The Latter Days: A Memoir

"Judith Freeman’s 2007 book, The Long Embrace, about Raymond Chandler’s unusual marriage, is one I dip into often for its psychological smarts and haunting images of early Los Angeles. Her evocative new memoir, The Latter Days, also focuses on the mysteries of a marriage: her own. Freeman was raised a Mormon in Utah. In the mid-1960s, at the age of 17, she married her sister’s former boyfriend and became a mother to an infant with severe heart problems. The Latter Days candidly dramatizes Freeman’s struggle to imagine other possibilities for herself beyond the ones Mormonism dictated to her."