Whatever You Do, Don't Write That

Sometimes I tell the story of how I came to write The Bishop’s Wife. It was after a long period of no sales when I was coming to see that I might never publish again in the young adult world that I’d done so well in. The crash of 2008 had hit publishing hard and I wasn’t the only author who had a series canceled, but it was painful. I sat with my agent in Park City, where he’d come because another client had a book made into a film, and had what I still think of as a “Come to Jesus” moment. I gave him a list of ten projects I was considering working on and wanted him to pick one for us to try to work together on one last time.

He scanned down the list and looked at the last one, which was The Bishop’s Wife, a mystery novel about a Mormon bishop’s wife who solves murders in her community. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t write that. No one cares about Mormons.”

People laugh whenever I tell this story and ask if I fired him. Actually, he ended up negotiating the contract on that book. It was a very important thing for him to tell me not to write that book and if you ask him, he will probably say what he told me after he read the first draft (which I sold to an editor friend who’d already told me she wanted me to write a Mormon mystery series for her). “I didn’t know you could write about Mormonism like that.”

It was important for me to believe as I wrote that book that no one would ever read it, that I was writing it only for me, and especially to believe that no Mormons would ever read it. I wrote about Mormonism the way I had learned to be able to live it, as a mostly non-believing member who still went to church every day but had no illusions about the perfection of prophets or of anyone else. I don’t think I could have been as honest about Mormonism if I had believed that Mormons would read it. I didn’t know how big a book it was going to be until almost all of the editing was done.

In fact, during that ten-month period as I was waiting for the book to come out and realizing the publicity Soho was putting into it, I feverishly wrote the next eight books in the series as I imagined them at the time. I always knew that I was going to write Linda out of the church. I didn’t see any other arc possible for her. I think on a subconscious level, I must have understood that this was also true for me. I was hanging on for dear life, arms shaking, and some part of me knew I couldn’t keep doing it. But the two parts of me also weren’t communicating super well because the cost of leaving Mormonism is so high. For Linda, it was high, too, but in a different way than for me.

I did my best to make the book mostly positive toward Mormonism. That was one of the big selling points of the book, that I was still an active participating member, that it wasn’t a “hatchet job” about Mormonism as most books published by New York are. But it still was rejected by Deseret Book and they refused to carry it in store, which meant that most Mormons never heard about it, except through the grapevine. The friend I dedicated the book to said that for several years afterward, people would call her and ask her in a whisper if she was the person the book was dedicated to, if she really knew the author. It had an audience within the church, but it was a kind of whisper network, not something most Mormons would readily admit to admiring. Unless they were my sort of Mormons. I was mostly OK with that.

I still remember that first year, as I went to book clubs to talk about the book and a Mormon woman asked me why I hadn’t had Linda kneel down to pray and ask God who the murderer was. I was baffled by this question and it took me a moment to answer. Eventually, I said, “because that hasn’t been my experience with prayer, that you get an answer that is that reliable.” And this woman told me blithely that if that was the case with me, I just hadn’t learned to listen to the Spirit well enough. Oh, really?

Another woman commented that she didn’t like the fact that the murderer ended up being a Mormon. “I wish you’d made it a non-Mormon instead.” I asked her if she was unaware that Mormons were also murderers. I had been inspired to write the book after the horrific, real-life case of Josh and Susan Powell, after all. And also, I didn’t think it would work in a series if every murder turned out to be committed by the non-Mormon in the group. But this is how a lot of Mormons think of other Mormons, as unimpeachable. One of the reasons affinity fraud’s capital is Utah.

Also one of the reasons that Mormons aren’t used to reading about themselves in fiction, because they have their own publishers who write in Mormon code for them. They got bored with me explaining everything. Ah, well, I did my best. I really and truly did.