something crazy.
The first term passed in a flurry of dinners and late-night parties,
punctuated by even later nights in the library. To qualify for a PhD, I
had to produce a piece of original academic research. In other words,
having spent five years reading history, I was now being asked to write
it.
But to write what? While reading for my master’s thesis, I’d been
surprised to discover echoes of Mormon theology in the great
philosophers of the nineteenth century. I mentioned this to David
Runciman, my supervisor. “That’s your project,” he said. “You can do
something no one has done: you can examine Mormonism not just as a
religious movement, but as an intellectual one.”
I began to reread the letters of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As
a child I’d read those letters as an act of worship; now I read them with
different eyes, not the eyes of a critic, but also not the eyes of a disciple.
I examined polygamy, not as a doctrine but as a social policy. I
measured it against its own aims, as well as against other movements
and theories from the same period. It felt like a radical act.
My friends in Cambridge had become a kind of family, and I felt a
sense of belonging with them that, for many years, had been absent on
Buck’s Peak. Sometimes I felt damned for those feelings. No natural
sister should love a stranger more than a brother, I thought, and what
sort of daughter prefers a teacher to her own father?
But although I wished it were otherwise, I did not want to go home. I
preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the
happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made
fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak. That feeling
became a physical part of me, something I could taste on my tongue or
smell on my own breath.
I bought a ticket to Idaho for Christmas. The night before my flight,
there was a feast in my college. One of my friends had formed a
chamber choir that was to sing carols during dinner. The choir had
been rehearsing for weeks, but on the day of the feast the soprano fell
ill with bronchitis. My phone rang late that afternoon. It was my
friend. “Please tell me you know someone who can sing,” he said.
I had not sung for years, and never without my father to hear me,
but a few hours later I joined the chamber choir on a platform near the