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 Freeman’s account of her life as a stylish young rebel in a strict Mormon household, but she doesn’t think it tells the whole story.
“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…
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