It is a truth universally acknowledged that novelists compound and create their stories out of the materials at hand. Authors must mortar-and-pestle their fiction from the worlds they know best, and characters must spring from the family and friends who have peopled the author’s past. As an apprentice writer, I found this terribly depressing. If my books had to emerge from my immediate past, the prospects where not promising.

My first novel was written in the usual first-novel flurry of pressure and pain, but since I had always wanted to be a professional author, there had to be a second book, and a third. That’s what writer’s do: write books. Knowing this, I despaired of a rich alluvial source for my fiction. I grew up, a middle-class girl, in a California town at the edge of the desert. A dry, hot, smug, and smoggy place, utterly bereft of any redeeming romance. As a kid, I felt painfully the lack of colorful people, of ocean vistas or urban excitement. As an aspiring writer, I was convinced my talents could be so much better served had I grown up in Paris, London, Dublin, some lovely literary place. Still, this California town was all I had in the way of authenticity, and if I were to be a writer, then from these few dry sticks, I knew I must make fire.

Imagine, then, my surprise as I began to write my second novel, These Latter Days. Once my characters arrived in St. Elmo, the book began to grow, to proliferate, to burgeon under my fingers, to balloon beyond any acceptable length. The first draft of this novel took me perhaps a year and a half to write, and weighed in finally at nine hundred pages. I found this astonishing. So did the editor who turned it down.

The girth and weight of the original manuscript resulted from my amazement, my sheer delight in the writing: characters, one after another, billowed from the typewriter, jumping up and down off the pages, shouting at me with their own stories, their tales and eccentricities. As they rolled out of the typewriter, I thought, Why isn’t this great! I’ll just incorporate this new character, this new story, this new scene somewhere else into the book, some place or another. And, inevitably, one character’s story involved many other people, and they too had tales, had families and lives, their own pasts. Thus the town of St. Elmo emerged.

So insignificant was this town to its author that I have absolutely no recollection of how I originally came by the name. The legend of St. Elmo’s fire I did not learn till some years later, and since it happens at sea, it had no bearing (At least not then). By the time I completed my nine-hundred-page behemoth of a book, I was exhausted, but cheered that a California burg full of Mormons, Methodists, and Philistines could yield so many characters.

The next version slimmed down to five hundred pages. Not the five hundred pages eventually published, but five hundred just the same. I finished this version some three years later. In this massive revision, my struggles were not so much with the length and scope of the novel as with the central character, Ruth Douglass. Once I had brought Kitty, the Lark of Liverpool, to America, married her to Gideon, and introduced her to her mother-in-law, Ruth Douglass, Ruth kidnapped the narrative. Ruth insisted that this was her novel. I resisted. Ruth and I fought it out for five hundred pages.

I thought the book belonged to Kitty because These Latter Days had begun its life as a short story, one of the first I ever wrote. It was a tale about an English working-class girl in Liverpool, a convert to the Mormon Church. In this story, Kitty was the central character, and the narrative developed her life in Liverpool, her uneasy attraction to the Church. I saw the conflict developing between Kitty’s own dreamy delusions and the rigors of the Mormon faith. But at a certain point (and while this was still a fairly short story; it grew, eventually, to almost a hundred pages), a writer I admired me that “These Latter Days” was not a story at all, but a novel. It did indeed become a novel—but it was no longer Kitty’s tale.

The final revision of the novel required two more years of my life, but at least I’d given up struggling with Ruth Douglass. I had acquiesced, said, in essence, Very well, it’s your book, and I proceeded to tell Ruth’s story, Kitty relegated to a fairly minor role. (And indeed I have never published Kitty’s tale.) Ruth is prickly and not particularly endearing, but I admired her, and she swept the novel in her wake.

So in the course of eight years’ labor on These Latter Days—both the novel and the story—I wrote probably thousands of pages. (I write everything over and over, insistently, persistently.) I carefully researched all my materials, both in terms of the Mormon Church and the era. I had based the characters very loosely on what I knew, or had heard, of my Mormon grandfather’s family. He was the eldest of twelve, born in an Idaho dugout. His father did in fact build the first brick house in that frontier county, and theirs was a rugged life.

But in writing and rewriting These Latter Days, first published in 1985, I made discoveries essential for all my work. I learned I could indeed mortar-and-pestle, pound-and-compound fiction out of the unpromising materials of my youth, out of the dry California town I had fled at the first opportunity, and to which I have imaginatively returned again and again, most recently in Graced Land and Caveat. In some significant and surprising way, I also came to St. Elmo with Ruth Douglass on that train that led down through Jesuit Pass.

Is there a real St. Elmo, California? Yes. St. Elmo belongs to readers who go there. On paper, St. Elmo has geography, terrain, population, history. The road map is in my head, the census I carry with me. I have written about St. Elmo from its earliest days, when that mad wandering Jesuit stumbled down the pass that bears his anonymous name. (And his tale came to me for the story “A Brief Inquiry into the Origins of St. Elmo, California.”) My past no longer seems unpromising, but rather evocative. Each time I write about St. Elmo, still more characters collect on its streets, and they too whisper and insinuate their stories; they too promise and suggest.

1. Lucius says of Ruth that he “never saw such a woman for getting things done.” What does Ruth “get done” and what does it cost her? Does Ruth Douglass act always from strength?


2. Religion is an essential part of the characters’ lives in this novel. Describe the ways in which the characters use religion. Is it a tool, a weapon, a shield, a comfort, an excuse, an obstacle, or some more complicated combination?


3. How do Ruth’s views of marriage change throughout her life? How do these beliefs affect the lives of her daughter and granddaughter?


4. The keeping of her terrible secret puts a lie at the center of Ruth’s life, leaves her “tethered to the truth by lies.” How does it affect her relationship with her children? With the Wickhams and the rest of St. Elmo? With her brother Albert? For Ruth, personally, what does this secret do to her inner life? Is confession finally food for her soul? Why does confrontation free her?


5. This is a novel of revelation and rebellion. Does revelation always precede rebellion? What toll does rebellion exact and what peril does revelation suggest? Is revelation the equivalent of vision?


6. The longstanding friendship of the atheist doctor and the Mormon widow puzzles and irritates St. Elmo. What unites the unlikely couple and why do they never marry?


7. How does the death of Eden reverberate through the lives of all the family?


8. Describe the relationship between Afton and Lil, between Afton and all the other Douglasses. From what source does Afton Lance draw her unshakeable zeal and certitude? Is she at all like Ruth?


9. What significance does Gideon’s Great Timetable have in the context of his character? The novel as a whole?


10. How are Eden Louise’s dreams shaped by regret? What influence does Kitty have on her daughter?