them. What is the proper arrangement of words? How do you craft an
apology for weakening someone’s ties to his father, to his family?
Perhaps there aren’t words for that. How do you thank a brother who
refused to let you go, who seized your hand and wrenched you upward,
just as you had decided to stop kicking and sink? There aren’t words
for that, either.
—WINTER WAS LONG THAT YEAR, the dreariness punctuated only by my
weekly counseling sessions and the odd sense of loss, almost
bereavement, I felt whenever I finished one TV series and had to find
another.
Then it was spring, then summer, and finally as summer turned to
fall, I found I could read with focus. I could hold thoughts in my head
besides anger and self-accusation. I returned to the chapter I had
written nearly two years before at Harvard. Again I read Hume,
Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought
about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What
is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict
with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?
I began the research. I narrowed the question, made it academic,
specific. In the end, I chose four intellectual movements from the
nineteenth century and examined how they had struggled with the
question of family obligation. One of the movements I chose was
nineteenth-century Mormonism. I worked for a solid year, and at the
end of it I had a draft of my thesis: “The Family, Morality, and Social
Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890.”
The chapter on Mormonism was my favorite. As a child in Sunday
school, I’d been taught that all history was a preparation for
Mormonism: that every event since the death of Christ had been
fashioned by God to make possible the moment when Joseph Smith
would kneel in the Sacred Grove and God would restore the one true
church. Wars, migrations, natural disasters—these were mere preludes
to the Mormon story. On the other hand, secular histories tended to
overlook spiritual movements like Mormonism altogether.
My dissertation gave a different shape to history, one that was
neither Mormon nor anti-Mormon, neither spiritual nor profane. It
didn’t treat Mormonism as the objective of human history, but neither