In the 1990s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began a campaign of revisionist history, seeking to overhaul the image of one woman: Emma Hale Smith, first wife of founder and prophet Joseph Smith. Years ago, when I first had the idea of writing a novel about the…

A culture of perfection is killing the very people it seeks to exalt. In 2009, I took a temporary assignment in Salt Lake City and moved there from Seattle, eager to live and work for a while in the heart of Latter-day Saint culture. Although I was no longer an active member of the church, I’d grown up in an LDS family whose…

My faith died with the hands of a priesthood holder on my head, as I received the blessing meant for some other woman. — By Libbie Grant One of my earliest memories takes place in the basement playroom of the house where I spent my early childhood in Rexburg, Idaho, one of the strongholds of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the religion into which I was born and which my ancestors…

We sat side by side in the forest, on a fallen tree where all the tears I’d shed had turned to lichen on the bark and all the words you’d given me were butterflies among the hanging moss. I never held your hand, not once, but roots are tangled underground where only the far-sighted see. We were made to make gods, you and me.

Ghost 1.2 I died. When doesn’t matter. Neither does how. It’s something we all do, sooner or later. Maybe you’ve done it already. A sudden cancer at age forty-seven, or the virus next week, or alone and content in my bed, a hundred and three, more than ready to go…

Ghost: 1.1 Forget Me Not Today we reached a hundred thousand deaths. It’s evening, and I’m standing in my garden, mildly stoned, feeling the heat of an unseasonably hot day lifting from the world, watering the plants, which are still alive, at least. I can feel the whole arc of…