What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky and Conscious Uncoupling

When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts. - Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

I love short story collections about as much as anything in this whole world, but I sometimes shy away from them because they make such hard blog posts to write. That's a bad reason to avoid something that I enjoy, but I've come up with much worse reasons to avoid other things that make me feel better about myself in general, so I guess it fits right in to my regular modus operandi. Did you know that's what MO means? I love it when people use acronyms that they don't know the root of. IE, we say EG to mean "for example" because I guess if I typed FE everyone would assume I mean the element iron. I never mean the element iron.

Running makes me feel good, but waking up when it's dark out and being cold does not. When I frickin go for it and do it anyway, I'm always, always glad, but here I am not having run for months. "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly," is probably my favorite bible verse about blowing chunks and then eating it. Barf is so gross, you guys, but I'll be darned if dogs don't want to see just in case. That's me when I'm wasting time on things that make me furious instead of doing things that make me happy.

I had a moment last week where I thought to myself, everything I love is horrible now. Obviously that's not true, but it made me sit and think about the things that I think define me vs. the things I spend a lot of time doing. Exempli gratia, reading the news. I like to be up to date on the world, but also I know I'm being tricked and I go for it anyway. Here, I just looked up the top 4 stories on my news app.

None of that is news. These were the top four "stories" while Sonoma, my wife's hometown, was burning to the ground. All of these headlines are either reactions to real news (that Harvey Weinstein stuff is hot garbage for sure and further indications that the louder a man proclaims himself to be feminist, the more on fire his trash is), or the kind of fluff you'd expect to see on one of those soap opera magazines in the checkout aisle. The literal majority of the stuff on my news feed is the political equivalent of teenage girls icing one of their friend group because she flirted with the head mean girl's boyfriend accidentally.

A couple of weeks ago (writing these posts confuse me because I write them a week in advance sometimes) I had kind of a breakdown after the shooting in Las Vegas (that the news isn't talking about anymore because we're too busy clicking on links about Twitter feuds) where I couldn't read any books. Not even comic books! I was in full-on depression mode where I laid in bed and went back and forth between Facebook and Instagram and everything was horrible.

My church had General Conference and there was a talk that doubled and tripled down on the kind of anti-gay talk that has the potential to exacerbate Utah's higher than average suicide rate for youths aged 11-17 (in full disclosure, the Utah Health Department says they haven't seen a correlation between LDS announcements and the suicide rate yet, though those things are obviously hard to isolate), which resulted in my participation in a several days long Facebook fight with a stranger. So that was fun and definitely made me feel better (it didn't).

I caught myself thinking like some kind of dang inspirational meme about cutting out the things from my life that were bringing me down, no matter how important I thought they were, and did one of those checklist things in my head.

Things that make me genuinely happy:
my wife
my kids
spending real time and having real conversations with friends and family
the Greek Food Festival
my new Super Nintendo Classic
The Defenders on Netflix
reading books
writing
cooking
volunteering
exercise
nature

Things that were contributing to feelings of hopelessness and horror:
Facebook (number one by far)
football (both fantasy football and the roller coaster ride of mostly nausea and fury punctuated periodically by thrills that constitute being a Raiders fan)
headlines about Donald Trump
headlines in general
The Iron Fist on Netflix
drinking too much soda

Then there were a bunch of things that were all muddled and complicated and made me both happy and sad in more or less equal measures. There are too many of these to list.

I was spending way too much time on the bad stuff, the vomit, the spew, the upchuck. It stank but I turned to it anyway. It would be still warm from my insides and already it looked delicious. Was it any wonder, reader, that I was sad? I was eating (metaphorical) ralph.

I couldn't help but remember an article I'd read (probably on Facebook) about Aziz Ansari "deleting the internet."

I was reading all this Trump stuff, and it doesn't feel like we're reading news for the reason we used to, which was to get a better sense of what's going on in the world and to enrich yourself by being aware. It seems like we're reading wrestling rumors," he said. "It's like reading about what happened on Monday Night Raw. When you take a step back, it all just seems so sensationalized. Trump's gonna get impeached! No, he's not. None of that sh-t's happening. But you are going to read all the articles. So if you take yourself out of it, you're not infected with this toxicity all the time. Also, guess what? Everything is fine! I'm not out of the loop on anything. Like, if something real is going down, I'll find out about it.

So I suspended by Facebook account for a week. It's back up now, but I haven't looked at it at all (hopefully this is true still by the time I post this. Please let it be true (update: it's not true)). I've got it up so that I can share blog posts and be available to people who need me and have no other way of contacting me, and there's the refugee thing coming up. I haven't left Instagram because there are so many babies on there that I love watching grow up and also I guess there are adults who I like following, too (mostly the babies).

It's funny, because I used this amazing super computer in my pocket to do essentially three things: check Instagram, check Facebook, and google actors while I'm watching a show to find out what else they've been in because they are so familiar you guys. With Facebook off of my phone, Instagram takes like 3 seconds to check up on and then I have the muscle memory to look at more stuff but there's no other stuff to look at. So I put Kindle on there. When I have that idle feeling of wanting to look at my phone because I'm in a waiting room or a passenger in a car or whatever, I can close it and be present (ideal), but if I need an escape, I can read a pulpy detective novel without feeling guilty about not reading the Big Important Books (BIBs) that I've challenged myself to read.

But Howie, you've said before that the answer to the unceasing amount of horror in the world is not to hide your head in the sand. Remember your amazing metaphor about rivers? Man. That was good. You've written some good blog posts, Howie. ARE YOU GOING BACK ON YOUR RIVER METAPHOR?

No one asked what he thought of River, but someone should have known that you do not take small things from small men.

Listen, I am not. I'm just stepping back and assessing what I have the capacity to handle, and more importantly, what I have the ability to impact. I am finally convinced that it doesn't matter how clever my Facebook posts are, or how much of a slam-dunk the think piece I just read about the correlation between gun ownership and gun deaths in the United States is, they are not changing anything. My vote can do that. The way I spend my money can do that. Personal conversations with people who respect me enough to really listen can do that.

I feel like I have more impact sitting with a rape victim in an emergency room while he or she endures the traumatic and invasive experience of evidence collection than I do citing statistics, even though those statistics are vitally important to public policy. These victims are so brave, you guys. They are in physical pain and emotional agony and still they decide to spend 4-8 hours in a hospital room so that maybe, maybe, the bad person gets caught. They do this even when the odds are against a successful conviction. Because, and the overwhelming majority of victims say this at some point in the process, they don't want it to happen to someone else.

If I can make that process even a tiny bit easier for them, maybe they'll convince other people to do it, too. Maybe it will give them the courage to speak up in a terrifying courtroom and look into the eyes of the person who took so much away from them and speak up into a microphone and tell the world that there is a monster who lives among them, goes to church with them, plays basketball with them. And hopefully the people who hear their story will teach their kids better, hold their friends accountable, and believe that it's a problem.

It seems to be working, by the way. Since the Wasatch Forensic Nurses team got added to my county, we've seen a sharp uptick in victims opting for evidence collection. I don't think this is because rape is on the rise, rather the word is getting out on A: what to do if it happens and B: that the people involved with it will do everything they can to make victims feel comfortable and supported.

Ansari said, "If something real is going down, I'll find out about it." Real to me doesn't mean eulogies about dead celebrities or immediate reactions to tweets and talk show monologues.

In my (stellar) river analogy, here's what I said:

When massive rainstorms and snowmelt come, the manipulated river can't handle the power. Banks get blown out and entire chunks are washed away and hauled downstream. It's just too much for the stream to handle. In a healthy system, that water is redistributed. Tributaries take some of it, floodplains do, too. Plants along the bank hang on to the soil to stop it from being washed away. Rocks in the stream reduce and reroute the sheer force of rushing water. 

I think a healthy society does the same thing. Some of us are damaged. And that damage makes it impossible to handle all the water that the storm sends our way. We need to spread it out sometimes. Many of us who manage to handle our own storms can take on a bit of someone else's when our lives are calm.

I tell family members of victims that they are like a reservoir. When one reservoir is full, managers release the spillway and send the water downstream to the next one. I tell them that they take on some of that trauma for their loved one, but that their reservoir can fill, too. We have a hotline just for them. They need people to talk to, also.

Here's where I'll talk a little about What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah. This is perfect because the title of the whole book is also the title of the story that I think makes my point so well. The whole story is there in that link. It's amazing and I think you should read it first. It's not that long (that's why they call it a short story), but it makes a point that I don't think you could make in any other way.

If you didn't read the story (because you're lazy) it's about a woman in a semi-apocalyptic future who works with a mathematical formula that allows "mathematicians" to take on grief and hurt from others. The main character specializes in wealthy families who have lost a child. Her ex was one of those do-gooder types who helped refugees process pain. There's a scary thing that can happen when you take on too much, though, which guess what that's a real thing.

There is a cost to taking on other people's hurt. It doesn't mean it isn't worth doing; a lot of things worth doing have a price. But you need to do it carefully. There's also a cost to filling ourselves up with anger and fear and hopelessness. Like reservoirs can be useless because they are filled with heavy metals and toxic chemicals, so can our emotional reserves. There's enough human suffering out there for us all to max out on it without filling ourselves up with trashy rumors.

If you're in a position where you have to be someone's support at the drop of a hat, you need to keep those reserves full, which means that sometimes you consciously uncouple from the things that fill you up. Self-care is a real thing and it's not selfish to do it. Think of it as carb-loading before a big athletic event. You're not being a glutton for eating all that tortellini if you know you're going to burn it off tomorrow. That's just preparation. If you're the type of person who is regularly approached for emotional support and that's something you're willing to do, do something nice for yourself on a regular basis.

There was a time when fantasy football was a way for me to relax and focus on something that doesn't matter as much anymore. But now it's all a mess in my head. The list of players I don't want to draft because they've hit their girlfriends or wives, or been accused of rape and had the case covered up by local law enforcement is getting longer and longer. So I skip them during the fantasy draft and don't have any of them on my team, which is sort of a cop out if I continue to support the organization as a whole, but OK. But then those same players who shouldn't even be not in jail end up playing against my fantasy team and destroy me. I hate losing anyway, losing an imaginary game because of a domestic abuser who looks like Wicket from Return of the Jedi is one million times worse.

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is a pretty amazing book from top to bottom. I got distracted with fantasy football (story of my entire fall-winter) and forgot to talk about it. The story I shared is a little sci-fi/speculative fiction, and there are a few of those. It also has some contemporary stories. One of my favorites, "Who Will Greet You at Home," feels like a traditional legend passed on from generation to generation. Also it's a pretty cracker jack scary story. And also also it's full of profound implications. I really loved it. I can't wait to see what Arimah does next.

So there's that. See? Writing posts about short stories is hard. For me it is. Staying off of Facebook is... well, it hasn't been hard yet. I don't miss it right now. I feel better. I watched about 15 minutes of football last weekend and turned it off and played Super Mario World instead. That felt great, you guys. When I lost it was my fault, and I could try again. And Super Mario World is a masterpiece.

Here's one more quote that reminds everyone that this is actually a blog about books and feelings and trauma and a lot a lot of other things: "I would never ask a person who hasn't tasted a dish whether it needs more salt."

#metoo

The post that would have gone up tomorrow was going to say that I was going to stay off of Facebook forever except for a few exceptions. It's a pretty good post and I thought that no matter how timely this one got, I would still post it as scheduled. But this one evolved and I guess that other one can wait a week so here you go.

Maybe by that post I'll have kicked the habit for good. Let's just assume that's what happened. You see I was really good for a pretty good stretch. I just used the site to tell you that there were new blog posts and make sure everyone involved with the refugee sponsorship knew that I still existed. Still to this point (hopefully) I have not written any jokes or hot takes or clicked on any articles that will make me mad (though I did see headlines that indeed made me very, very despondent). But today I did kind of binge on the thing like a black bear in a doughnut shop.

Did you know that in my office when we get a call that there is a nuisance black bear (nuisance in this case usually means minding its own business but in a place where things could go very south very quickly if said bear decided not to mind its own business, like a campground or a shopping mall), we get day-old doughnuts to bait them. Bears love doughnuts, and all they know is the day-old ones! If you put a bear in a doughnut shop and they got a chance to try the fresh ones I assume it would be like me greedily reading Facebook.

Except doughnuts are delicious, and the thing I can't stop reading is the horrible stories of people who I know and love sharing that they have been sexually harassed or assaulted. Were you shocked and horrified by everyone who used #metoo? If you were a guy, you probably were. If you are a woman, you might be, but more from the sense of sadness and maybe a tinge of relief because it's not just you.

I can't imagine what it's like, to be honest. Here's what I think, though. Please correct me if I'm wrong. You've had these horrible experiences, and you wonder what you're doing wrong. Why are you the one having men make terrible comments to you, or the one who got cornered when you were very young by someone who you were supposed to trust. Or have had men on multiple dates--nice men--push you for more than you were willing to give. Even guys who you just thought were your friends. Why does this keep happening to you? What are you doing wrong? So you find out that it isn't just happening to you. It's happening to all of your friends, too. And even like your aunt is saying stuff. Was it your grandma, too? Great-grandma? Probably.

Then you start thinking about all the pain you experienced and you look at the faces of all these women around you and realize that they are carrying much of that same pain with them and I imagine it's just overwhelming and horrible. I'm sorry, you guys. I'm sorry that we are so bad at believing you and also so bad at understanding the breadth of the problem. Also the part where we are garbage? Sorry.

That's me trying to understand women's point of view, because much of the stories I've read so far have been from women, and many of them have talked about the severe mistreatment they received after telling someone. These experiences are horrible, for sure, but they are compounded by the difficulty of living in a patriarchal society where the main people you need to tell your story to in order for something to happen are men.

I read stories of young girls telling their church leaders that they were raped and being told by the church leader to keep it to themselves so that their future husband won't see them as "used." They watched their attackers go on missions or get married in the temple, knowing that they never told anyone themselves. They told mutual male friends about what happened, only to be disbelieved and even ridiculed. They got to school the next day and were ostracized by their friends who decided to side with the attacker they knew because "he's not that kind of guy."

It's not just women telling their stories, though. Lots of men experience sexual harassment and assault. And it's way more men than you thought (that article explains this stuff better than I ever could). When I was in training to become a volunteer, I started to remember multiple times when I was harassed in a way that would clearly qualify as sexual harassment, but the whole thing was so complicated by rules of traditional masculinity and gender roles that all I knew at the time was that it made me uncomfortable. I had coworkers, girls several years older than me, who would whisper dirty words in my ear because I couldn't stop from blushing. A girl at school followed me around and pinched my butt when I wasn't paying attention. A guy I barely knew at a party explicitly described an imaginary sexual scenario he made up involving me and a movie star, and when I was clearly uncomfortable, he blamed my discomfort on my Mormon upbringing.

I would laugh along with them because I wanted to be cool. And part of me liked the attention, even if it made me uncomfortable, because I really liked attention. My coworkers were even my friends. I liked them and liked hanging out with them, I just wished that it wasn't so weird sometimes but couldn't place why it was weird. I wasn't going to report them to a manager; the thought never even occurred to me. First, because I didn't know what was happening or what I would even call it, and second, I liked them. I didn't want them to get fired, because then who would I work with?

I was also on the wrong side of this sometimes. I definitely tended to get caught up in talk and actions that almost certainly made someone uncomfortable. I mistook someone's uncomfortable laughter or silence with approval. Even in times when I wasn't directly participating, I certainly stayed silent when I shouldn't have. This is even when I knew that silence or quiet laughter was my own way to cope with uncomfortable situations. 

In retrospect, the right thing to do probably would have been just to say something. Tell them it made me uncomfortable. Probably a lot of cases would be solved that way, but none of us are taught how to do that. Men aren't taught how to respond to unwanted sexual comments. It's assumed that we're always into it. We aren't taught how to respond if a woman makes overt advances. Men can be left in situations where they know that they were physically aroused, but also that something happened that they had decided years before that they would not let happen until they felt like it was right for them. And that they had said no right then but it happened anyway.

We as a society are horrible at dealing with this stuff. We joke about young boys who are coerced into sexual relationships with their adult teachers. Or we even see those young boys as the perpetrators, seducing lonely women who finally gave into their charms. We see men as physically large and strong and unable to be coerced into non-consensual sex, while forgetting that the responses to trauma are multiple, that "fight or flight" only tells a tiny part of the story. We always forget "freeze."

Similar to the flight/fight response, a freeze response is believed to have adaptive value. In the context of predatory attack, some animals will freeze or “play dead.” This response, often referred to as tonic immobility (Gallup, 1977), includes motor and vocal inhibition with an abrupt initiation and cessation. Ethologists have documented non-volitional freeze responses in several animal species (Arduino & Gould, 1984; Kalin, Shelton, Rickman, & Davidson, 1998). Freezing in the context of an attack seems counterintuitive. However, tonic immobility may be the best option when the animal perceives little immediate chance of escaping or winning a fight (Arduino & Gould, 1984; Korte, Koolhaas, Wingfield, & McEwen, 2005). For example, tonic immobility may be useful when additional attacks are provoked by movement or when immobility may increase the chance of escaping, such as when a predator believes its prey to be dead and releases it.

Despite evidence suggesting that tonic immobility may be a key facet of alarm reactions, freezing has received relatively little scientific attention in humans. One exception is the PTSD/rape literature wherein several studies have described a rape-induced paralysis that appears to share many of the features of tonic immobility (Galliano, Noble, Travis & Puechl, 1993; Mezey & Taylor, 1998; Scaer, 2001; Suarez & Gallup, 1977). This literature suggests that a relatively high percentage of rape victims feel paralyzed and unable to act despite no loss of consciousness during the assault (Burgess & Holmstrom, 1976; Heidt, Marx, & Forsyth, 2005). 

- Exploring Human Freeze Response to a Threat Stressor, Schmidt et al.

If anyone--male or female--has said "no" and had that no ignored, we would be fundamentally misunderstanding the ways our bodies and chemicals and brains and all that to assume that it's just a matter of fighting or running. Not to mention the complex emotions going on when something is going on outside of one's control. Even if guys are bigger, are they going to punch a woman who keeps going even if she's told to stop? Body slam her?

I'm glad we're talking about this right now, and it would be a missed opportunity to not join in. But we have so far to go. For example, this spring a new bill was passed in Utah lowering the age for someone to get a concealed gun permit to 18, the bogus explanation being that it would prevents sexual assault on campuses (that just happens to be sponsored by the companies that make guns). According to a nationwide survey, 90% of rape victims knew their attacker prior to the attack. Often they take place on dates, or in social situations, or with a boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse. How many of those people are carrying a gun when they're watching movies with their boyfriend, let alone willing to kill someone they're on a date with or have been involved with for years?

None of this addresses the risks faced by gay and trans men and women, though statistically they are at an exponentially higher risk. It doesn't address sports and military hazing, which often fulfills every definition of rape but is dismissed as some kind of "boys will be boys" excuse. Our society seems only able to comprehend ambushes and rapes in prison, which we use as a joke or a deterrent, or molestation, which also we have such a profound misunderstanding of that at times we may as well know nothing.

This started out as a book post, but I don't have a way to connect it to the one I read in a way that would even remotely make sense. It certainly fits with other books I've read this year, including The Round House, Border Child, Shelter, Lucky Boy, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Bad Romance, too. Elena Ferrante has somehow crystallized this rage into something weaponized. It turns out if you start reading books written by women, you start learning about these stories. Just like it doesn't take a lot of people saying #metoo on your social media feed, it doesn't take a lot of authors from vastly different backgrounds telling the same story over and over to see how much more work we have to do on this.

So let's get to work.

A Song for Issy Bradley and 90s Kids Am I Right

He keeps talking but Claire can't keep up with his words, she can't catch them, they're flying past her ears like tiny bids, fluttering to the open door and out into the hospital corridor. He has made Issy's recovery contingent on her faith and she doesn't know how she will ever forgive him. - Carys Bray, A Song for Issy Bradley

A Song for Issy Bradley made me bawl. A lot. Not just the sort of weepy, whoa, is a book making me cry? kind of sniffly uncertainty, but full on sobs. It does so many things phenomenally well, but after trying to go to sleep last night following a marathon reading that left me blinking at my clock as it insistently told me that it's 2:30 AM, I couldn't shake one thing. This book would have been near flawless if it had been set in the 1990s. But it's not, and to me that's a real problem.

I stopped watching The Walking Dead after the season in the prison, whichever that one is. I've been reading the books for a long time, and couldn't stand what they did to my favorite character (Andrea) and how much time they spent with my least favorite character (The Governor). Aside from a handful of conversations and the occasional headline, I haven't looked back. Which is fine. There's a lot of show there and a lot of it is gross and I can get gross stuff from other places, like having children.

The upshot of this is that I don't have a lot of input in conversations about The Walking Dead TV show because even though I have intimate knowledge with the first handful of seasons and the source material, I acknowledge that too much has changed since then for me to have much to say about the current status of the show. I'd probably still get some stuff right (whoa, Carl sucks), but I'd definitely mess up on others (isn't it cool how alive Glen is and how dead he isn't?)

That's my problem with Carys Bray's portrayal of the LDS (shorthand for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) church in A Song for Issy Bradley. And I need to include some big massive caveats before I go any further. I usually don't read online reviews of books before I write about them, because I want to make sure my opinions are my own, and also online reviews are written by Mogwai who have eaten chicken out of a bucket after midnight (I mean the post-rock indie band--they get indigestion). But last night/this morning, I couldn't help it. The results were about what I expected. People with little knowledge about the church were pleased that the book confirmed a lot of their suspicions. People who had left the church a decade or so ago were ecstatic to see the realities of their lives portrayed in rich literature, and people who were still faithful saw little of their faith expressed on the pages.

This is basically my bishop's face when he sees this book

I didn't want to fall into one of those categories, and don't think I do. When I picked up the book I welcomed a harsh and critical look at a church and its surrounding culture that I think is deeply flawed in a very human way (as institutions run by humans are want to do). And when it comes to characters, Bray just absolutely nails it. There are no villains here, and no heroes, either. Everyone is flawed and trying their best and on a journey to improve. That's how I think about my religion, too. I think it has a past replete with genuine horrors, a present that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes extremely damaging, and a future that is unknown but I'm basically optimistic about because despite everything I just have to stick with optimism or I don't get out of bed in the morning. That and an eagerness to find out what new color combinations the marshmallow engineers have come up with next in the world of Lucky Charm rainbows.

Anyone can be brave for five minutes or an hour or two. The bravery no one talks about is the hardest bravery of all. When you get up in the morning even though you'd rather be dead, that's brave.

Let me give you a quick synopsis: the Bradley family is one of those perfect Mormon families we all grew up with (or in?). Ian is the Bishop, a leadership position that is unpaid but requires enormous amounts of personal time, and he throws himself into the calling with all of his heart. When we first meet the Bradley family he is missing his son Jacob's 7th birthday party, and his wife Claire is singlehandedly planning the day. Claire was a convert to the church, having joined it shortly after falling in love with Ian.

They have four kids. In addition to Jacob, there's 4-year-old Issy and two older teens. Zippy is the oldest, and confused about the conflicting lessons at church about female sexuality. She's been taught all her life that it's the boys who want sex, and it's the girls' job to keep them away at all costs. Except she kinda wants it too; is there something wrong with her? Then there's Alma, though he insists everyone call him Al, because Alma is a girl's name. Al isn't interested in explaining that he was named after a Book of Mormon prophet to his peers, even though his dad calls it a missionary opportunity.

The family has to deal with a tragedy that is portrayed so expertly that I am still grieving. Even while telling myself that none of the characters are real. I'm just gutted by it. Faith and family are tested, etc. I want to point out that from my experience, this is not a typical LDS family, but one that I know exists. Even the book acknowledges that while Alma isn't allowed to participate in team sports because they're too "worldly," many other Mormon kids are. Even PG-13 goes to far for these folks. There's no TV, except Book of Mormon cartoon videos (yeah, that frickin scam). It's basically Gilligan's Island. These guys are hardcore.

Early on in the book I was delighted by a gentle (and sometimes not) skewering of many LDS tropes. And much of it resonated with me down to my very bones. Some of the things I was taught as a kid in church I now consider genuinely damaging to adult life and I've seen firsthand how it can be absolutely devastating to victims of sexual assault and abuse, to name just one example. I was grimly amused by a teen girl's complaint that while she was given multiple handouts about how to prepare to be a perfect and pure wife, the boys her age were playing basketball in the gym. The assumption being that men had little to aspire to other than church service and jobs, while women had a complex code of domestic perfection and femininity that needed intensive training. A scene where the Bradley mother, Claire, just destroys one of Mormon culture's worst object lessons by indulging in some ABC gum in front of a young women's teacher is pretty priceless. 

At times the portrayals veer toward caricatures, especially when given the limited handful of side characters the Bradley family deals with. But I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Fiction (and often nonfiction) distills characters to their most concentrated forms. Timelines compress. In one book we're shown every bad example and painful church lesson an adult has experienced over a lifetime taking place within just a few weeks of time for the Bradleys. That's a reasonable writing technique, but it's worth recognizing.

There are only just a few ward members (for the uninitiated, wards are another word for local congregations) that we meet, and they are all broad stereotypes. There is one "cool" Mormon leader who gives out Kit-Kats and one time takes his shirt off and spins it around his head during a rugby game and everyone is kind of shocked but also amused. But aside from him, it's a rogues gallery of the weirdos every LDS person meets on their journey of holding fast to the iron rod. The doomsday prepper, the "old maid" who is approaching 30 and is still  unmarried, the purity obsessed young women's leader. The Bradleys unfortunately carry the brunt of the responsibility to show that Mormons can be normal and funny and sometimes awful and trying their very best but failing most of the time. 

Honestly, I think that Bray pulls as many punches as she delivers. And there are real or at least perceived miracles that happen here. Prayers are answered, though in ways not anticipated (a very, very Mormon kind of thing to happen), and the boring conclusion I was anticipating -- a wholesale abandoning of the faith by the Bradley family -- doesn't happen. I think there's fondness in Bray's portrayal of her culture (she says she left the church at age 30, replacing it with writing), even though she has a hefty amount of anger about the lessons she learned. One online reviewer, post-gremlin transformation, called the book "preachy."

In short, I think Bray does a fantastic job of preserving a near exact portrayal of the experience of being a Mormon teen the same time that I was a Mormon teen. I was amazed at how similar the experience was in the UK compared to my Utah upbringing. I have a hunch that, similar to my experience in Mexico, sometimes Mormons in other countries were even more zealous in some ways due to being a tiny minority. I felt sometimes they had a chip on their shoulder to prove to us Utah missionaries how hard they can Mormon. This accuracy is so uncanny that the handful of times when it seems to get something fundamentally wrong, it was jarring. The problem is that Bray stopped watching The Mormon Show several seasons ago, never got caught up, and wrote a thinkpiece about it anyway.

This book is what it feels like to be Mormon in the 90s perfectly, but it's set in the 2010s, and that's a problem. At one point, someone quotes a passage from a church lesson manual from 1993, and Claire points out that the manual is outdated, that a lot can happen in twenty years. The lesson teacher points out that the church is the same today as it was yesterday. This is a very common Mormon refrain and patently false. I wish that Bray had taken her own advice. The church is in many ways massively different than it was when I grew up in it. I would argue that in most ways it's for the better.

The way church leaders teach about mental illness, for example, is vastly different than the portrayal in the book, even if it feels more or less in line with my experience from a couple of decades ago. I remember a mother who suffered from profound depression who was viewed more or less as having a personality flaw. Depression was often viewed as the result of unresolved sin. Obviously that's horrible, and there has been massive amounts of progress on that front since. Church leaders today offer referrals to therapists, and will even pay for it out of member donations. In General Conference meetings (our twice-yearly world-wide church meetings), mental illness is spoken about frankly and kindly. In my volunteering I work with phenomenal LDS therapists who are fluent in both modern research and the intricacies and complications of religion.

Does that mean that people from my generation and before don't still harbor and believe the things we were taught before? Nah. There are still problems. But not in the monolithic form that is portrayed in A Song for Issy Bradley. The same goes for some of the horrible lessons young women were taught about personal purity. Those manuals are no longer in use, and since I spent some time teaching young men and women in church, I can say that the topics are handled with much more maturity and sensitivity now.

It would be blindly optimistic, even for me, to assume that these lessons still don't find their way into discussions on Sundays, because those kinds of habits die hard. But they are dying. Because Bray has apparently been out of the loop for some time, she understandably misses some stuff. It's obvious especially when her 2014-or-so Mormons aren't talking about the things that are really dividing members right now, especially the teens she writes about. There is a quantifiable exodus of young Mormons from the church that has little to do with the subjects Bray brings up. Millennials are leaving the church (all churches, actually) often because of a divide between their personal conscience and the views of the church on social issues. There's some pretty good red meat there for a critic of the LDS faith to explore. Instead Bray focuses on the things that apparently bothered her when she was young.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about reputations, and how I wanted (and still want) people to see me as I am today, not how I was when I was younger. I'd be sad as heck if someone who hasn't spent time with me lately wrote a book with me as a character today who still acted like I did ten or fifteen years ago. It would gut me, to be honest. I'm a big advocate of letting people change and progress, and feel the same way about institutions. There's value in soberly assessing the history of a person or church or nation, while also acknowledging progress made today. Like, look at how dumb Nintendo was in the 90s. We can all laugh at that while still acknowledging that Breath of the Wild was dope AF.

All of this would be fixed so easily if she'd just set the book in the 90s. Church members reading it would be confronted with how different the church was almost 20-30 years ago and forced to really notice how much things change and progress over one's lifetime. Even in a church that was "the same yesterday, today, and forever." We could use it as a way to remind ourselves that if there is something we learn at church that doesn't sit well with our conscience, that we were all given the agency to do what we think is right. And sometimes history is on our side when it all shakes out. Remember when everyone thought Sonic the Hedgehog was better than Super Mario World, but you knew better? It's like that.

Outsiders, who are going to be inclined to see the portrayal in whatever light their preconceived notions have set, would at least know that this story is a time capsule. I've loved reading stories about other's faith and religious traditions, even when I find aspects of it foreign at best and horrible at worst, I can also see beauty in aspects of it. I think the LDS tradition could and should have that light shined on it as well. A Song for Issy Bradley gets so close. I'd recommend it to anyone curious about the culture, with the big addendum that things have changed since then. And the assumption based on past events that it will change a lot in the future.

I think many members will enjoy it, too. Watching the family deal with tragedy from the LDS perspective was especially powerful for me, and gave me a searing insight into our particular form of grieving. We are taught sometimes that we should be happy, even in spite of horrible events, because we have a more enlightened viewpoint on God's plan. Sometimes we forget that it's OK to be sad.

The postman slides fat bundles of commiseration through the letter box every day: heartfelt wishes and bad poems in muted, floral pastels. People write little notes inside the cards. She is longing for a note saying "I'm so sorry"; she is sick of explanations and justifications.

All that being said, be prepared for some very frank discussions of things a lot of LDS consider sacred. Even if we talk about them all of the time at least as frankly and irreverently as Bray does in our private conversations, it's startling to see them on a page. And don't be surprised if amid all of the dead-on details, there are a few big missteps. Some of it might be hard to hear, too. The book saves its most potent vitriol for Mormon culture, while rarely critiquing what we call doctrine, but I know that those things can be hard to separate.

As with most fiction, there's truth and then there's Truth. Bray gets some of the truth wrong, in my experience, but when it comes to the Truth--the capturing of life's essence in all its pain and hurt and everything--she's accomplished something pretty amazing here.