Leaving Home: Personal Essays

Leaving Home
Personal Essays
MARY LYTHGOE BRADFORD
Paperback. 172 Pages. / 0-941214-58-3 / $7.95

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With evident fondness, Bradford recalls the old ward house and her activities there, including the weekend budget movies which, "although they were family outings were not family movies. They were horrendous affairs which scared me for years." She remembers Uncle George who had a cleanliness fetish and flooded their backyard cesspool. She recalls the research for her master's thesis on Mormon novelists, "the forbidden Vardis Fisher," Maureen Whipple, and Virginia Sorensen, and her naivete her first year in Washington, D.C. She remembers taking up jogging in the 1970s, and flying to Utah for her father's ninetieth birthday celebration, which turned into a funeral instead. She describes her recent visits to the Phillipines and Spain with her children who served church missions there.

Mary Lythgoe Bradford, M.A., English, University of Utah, is the author of Leaving Home: Personal Essays and Lowell L. Bennion: Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian; editor of Personal Voices: A Celebration of Dialogue and of Mormon Women Speak; and a contributor to Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature, A Thoughtful Faith, A Little Lower than the Angels, and A Time to Weep and a Time to Sing. She is a former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and her own articles have appeared in BYU Today, This People, The Deseret News, The Journal of Pastoral Counseling, and elsewhere. She has received awards from the Association for Mormon Letters, the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies (the Evans Award), and a recent "independent scholarship grant" from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies to research and write a biography of Virginia Sorensen.