We’re sitting around the dinner table with Jon’s mother and two of his siblings. His youngest sister, soon to be divorced, is taking a bite of wild rice and telling us about an older man who was trying to pick her up at Costco. She shakes her head and says, “My life sounds like someone’s blog.”
“You know,” I say as I point my fork across the table, “I bet there is a huge market for that type of story: thirty-something Mormon gets back into the dating scene. Horror ensues.”
She nods vigorously. “It’s so depressing. All it would say is, ‘Mormon celibate meets a lot of weirdos.'”
Jon’s oldest sister who is sitting at the other end of the table sets down a piece of buttered bread so that she has both hands free. “It would be a two-page thriller,” she says, and then she cups both hands in the shape of an open book. She looks at her left hand as if that were the first page and says, “It,” and then looks at her right hand and says, “Sucks! The End.”
“Except the editor would send it back and ask for something a little less abrupt,” I say having browsed the Mormon book display at the grocery store countless times. “Like, ‘It sucks! In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.'”