Between the lines
Judith Freeman uses a famous quote from Czeslaw Milosz on the last page of her new memoir, “The Latter Days”: “When a writer is born into a family,” Milosz said, “the family is finished.” It’s tempting to buy into such literary fatalism after reading Free
“Is it the family that’s really finished or simply the writer’s place in it?” Freeman writes. “Could a family still be a family with parts missing?”
The short answer is yes, a family of 10 can lose a few parts and survive a fate far worse than the sixth child (second girl) using its members as material for her books. A fuller explanation, one that doubles as a one-sentence review of Freeman’s deceptively transparent memoir, comes in a quote from Raymond Chandler, a writer Freeman loves above all others.
“Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines,” Chandler said.
Freeman shadowed Chandler and his wife, Cissy, through dozens of Southern California addresses in her book “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved.” When Cissy died, Chandler fell apart and burned his letters to her. A few scattered love poems were spared the fire; Freeman read them at a graveside ceremony when Cissy’s ashes were buried next to his under a new headstone with another pithy Chandler quote: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
Chandler is missing from “The Latter Days” — the younger Freeman identifies with “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” — but his dark themes fall across its pages. Growing up Mormon in Ogden, Utah, in the 1950s and ’60s is all about conformity, and being in the middle of eight kids spread across two decades is nothing unusual. Plenty of families had more. A pioneer mentality prevailed. Freeman writes, with no irony, that in 1954 “my mother lost a son, gave birth to one, and became a grandmother, all within a few months’ time.”
If that sentence lands with a wallop, check out the prologue: Freeman is 22, living at home, getting a divorce after four years of marriage to a man who was once her older sister’s boyfriend. She has a 4-year-old son who’s had two heart surgeries he wasn’t expected to survive. She has a temporary job at the same church-owned department store where her mother works. Oh, and she’s having an affair with the married heart surgeon who operated on her son.
Who wouldn’t want to keep reading?
“The Latter Days” (wonderful title) is a confessional. Freeman’s father was a frustrated man, a Mormon true believer who saw himself as a “bohemian musician” but was stunted in clerical jobs at the local Air Force base. He ruled his noisy family through moodiness and rages, sometimes picking up his children by the hair and dragging them around at the slightest offense. When his ever-nurturing wife picked him up at work, he would check the car’s odometer and question whether she was “gadding about” on unnecessary trips.
Mormonism as a Judy Freeman experienced it was patriarchal to its core, openly racist and with a creepy streak of exploitation and abuse. Her parents, who considered themselves broad-minded, had a black dog named the n-word before she was born. She was sexually harassed more than once, by boarders and bishops and neighbors, experiences that left her “a slyer girl” who “kept more of me to myself.”
“There was something specific to men and their overbearing ways that was disturbing,” she writes, “because it reminded you of who held the power to make your life either miserable or good.”
By high school, Freeman was pushing back hard against her family and church. Dating and then marrying her sister’s old boyfriend was revenge against a favored sibling that had the effect of getting Freeman out of the house. Her son’s birth was frightening; her role was strictly physical, the 17-yearold kept in the dark as decisions were made by male doctors. When the suave European surgeon initiated an affair, she jumped in, brushing away his marriage, children and the power he held as her son’s doctor.
The surgeon encourages Freeman’s desire to write, and for that I’m thankful. “The Latter Days” is clean, strong and deep, a raging river of a story that its author carried until she couldn’t hold it back. It is an arrow straight from Mormon country, from the Mountain West and from the heart.