Book Review
Tasting the Past

Heidi Hulse Micklesen
Volume 23, No. 2

Virginia Sorensen’s classic Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood, first published by Harcourt, Brace in 1963, has been reprinted recently (1998) by Signature Books along with another one of her well-known works, The Evening and the Morning. We are grateful to Signature for making the works of this icon of Mormon literature available once again and look forward to the publication of others of Sorensen’s works.

I typically avoid Mormon fiction, but the subtitle Memories of a Mormon Childhood intrigued me. Perhaps I hoped that something seemingly based on real life events would not contain the cliches and happy endings that I fear when I think of the many Mormon stories that I have heard. Therefore, I was surprised to find Virginia Sorensen’s stories to be a rare and refreshing look at Mormon life in Utah, namely because they were set in the 1920s. Because I am not a Church history enthusiast, I rarely read anything by or about Mormons in earlier years. Yet one of the most endearing features of this collection, I found, was the sense of vicarious nostalgia I got for those early years in the Church before everything as we now know it was taken for granted. I also appreciated Sorensen’s ability to successfully and subtly incorporate intriguing issues and events into otherwise uncontroversial topics, told with the naivete and enthusiasm of a young child. 

First published in 1963, Where Nothing Is Long Ago is a collection of ten stories based on actual people and events from Sorensen’s childhood in Utah. There appears to have been some debate over whether these stories are personal essays or fictional stories. In the book’s foreward, Susan Howe describes how Eugene England, during a 1988 BYU symposium, referred to Sorensen as the "founding foremother" of Mormon personal essayists. Sorensen subsequently expressed offense at England’s remark, feeling that "his claim wrenched her work out if its authentic genre" (foreword, p. xi). Howe details the many characters, events, and places from the stories that were factually based, and the stories themselves are so natural and simple in plot that it is easy to assume they are true. A searching reader cannot tell where fact ends and fiction begins. 

As I read the stories, I found myself siding with England. Believing that I was reading about Sorensen’s actual experiences and feelings caused me to become more intimately interested and involved in her stories. As England fittingly states: "It seems to make a difference in our ethical response if we believe that at least a major part of the experience was really real – that it indeed happened in real time and space to people like us" (foreword, p. x).

Even though Sorensen eventually stopped attending church, she viewed her Mormon upbringing as essential and inseparable from her childhood recollections. I appreciated the fact that she did not choose to be overtly critical of the Church within her stories; too often I find that an author’s cynicism obscures any other purpose or virtue in her writing. For example, in "The Ghost," Sorensen tells of a "Negro" with a beautiful singing voice who suddenly appears in their congregation. Sorensen, in child-like innocence, smiles and talks to him, much to the chagrin of her best friend Carol, the bishop’s daughter. As Sorensen questions Carol about the new man, Sorensen exclaims, "Maybe he wants to come to Utah and join the Church and get to be ‘white and delightsome!’" Carol, who apparently considers herself more wise and informed, immediately and simply corrects her friend by stating, "That’s not for niggers. . . . That’s just for Indians" (p. 20). I naturally shuddered at such dialogue – both at the equating of "white" with "delightsome" and at the blatant ignorance in Carol’s response. As the black man’s stay in the ward was extended, and I read of unfriendly stares and parents who forbade their children from hiking near the man’s camp, I could not help but wonder how different from this situation we are in this "enlightened" year of 2000. Perhaps the stares are subtler and the inquiries more discreet, but are blacks any more welcome or integrated in our homogeneous congregations? 

Though most of her subjects are hardly controversial or unusual – family stories and traditions, secrets shared with a best friend, memories of a first pet and first crush – Sorensen succeeds in keeping her stories interesting with clever titles and intriguing flashbacks and anecdotes.  She often clothes a controversial subject orfamily scandal in a more traditional story or maintains a lighthearted tone so as not to disrupt the flow of the narration. "The Apostate" is not, as I expected, about the town Jack Mormon shunned by the community and forever referred to by parents cautioning their children not to become wayward. Instead, it is about Sorensen’s own free-thinking grandmother, who sends oranges and pomegranates from California and reads the Bible for poetry. When Sorensen’s family receives a letter from this grandmother, who at one point describes herself as "a wicked old apostate," Sorensen is horrified and prays desperately that her grandmother might one day "see the light." As Sorensen writes of her grandmother’s opinions of women’s oppression under polygamy and the priesthood, I wondered how many of these views Sorensen grew to share. 

Whether she had the same opinions or not, Sorensen skillfully mastered the task of writing about this older woman through both the eyes of a concerned child as well as those of an admiring adult. The grandmother is portrayed as a woman of integrity and intellect whose departure from the Church did not hinder her quest to be a good Christian. One of the most striking interchanges in the book occurs when Sorensen’s mother asks her grandmother, who is on her death bed, why she continues to wear her temple garments when she has ceased to "believe in all that." As the grandmother struggles to find the strength within her frail body, she proclaims, "I made a promise, that’s why. And when I make a promise, I keep it!" 

In "The Other Lady," Sorensen recounts the scandal of her grand-father’s second wife – formerly his mistress – within a tale of going into town to buy a new hat. Upon discovering that she owned a hat shop, young Sorensen’s mother takes her two daughters into town under the pretence of buying new hats. Sorensen finds a hat she feels she must own, and the interplay is humorous as the mother desperately tries to leave while her daughter interacts unabashedly with the new wife. Yet amidst the stir caused by the hat, the reader is made aware of the great pain this scandal caused the family. The next time the girls see their grandfather is the last; their parents make it clear that he is no longer welcome at their house. This story is a good example of Sorensen’s ability to write from a child’s point of view while including the nuances and crucial information that convey the full meaning of the event to her readers. 

Whether Virginia Sorensen stories are personal essays or fiction, her collection of stories was artfully written, in a way that draws her readers into life in Utah in the early 1900s. Though I believe this collection would be most interesting to Mormon readers, I think there is a quality to her writing that would attract non-Mormons as well. Sorensen herself said in 1980, "When I went away [from Utah], I found [Mormonism] was the thing about me that interested people most. And I have found that all through the years" (foreword, p. viii). 

In addition to Where Nothing is Long Ago, Sorensen published a total of seven children’s novels, one of which won the coveted Newbery Medal, and eight adult novels. After finishing her collection, I find myself more willing to read Mormon fiction than I have been in the past.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Heidi Hulse Mickelsen earned a master’s in educational policy from Stanford so that she can someday work on improving public education. Heidi currently lives in the Boston area, where she teaches middle school math and awaits the arrival of her first child in the spring.

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