Interview With Brian Evenson, Author of "The Open Curtain"

This is an interview with Brian Evenson author of "The Open Curtain." To find out more about his book click here

Do you feel that it's inherent in Mormon culture to suppress or deny religious history or at least the facts that might blemish the church's reputation in any way?

I don't know if it's inherent, but it's certainly been established practice for a number of years. In the 1950s, the Mormon Church had almost no publicity department; now, that's one of the largest departments in the Church's bureaucracy. The Mormon Church has acted more and more like a corporation as time has gone on, and has become incredibly conscious of negative publicity. I do think that too often that leads to suppression of or minimizing of facts from Mormonism's very colorful and to my mind very interesting past. In the last few decades Mormonism has worked very hard to present itself as a Christ-centered Church that fits really snugly into Middle America. But to be able to see it that way, you have to forget a lot of Mormonism's history.

I think often times Mormons are shocked or surprised when violent things bubble up. It's really difficult for them to fathom how or why violent crimes like the Lafferty murders take place in a religious culture where things can be blatantly disregarded. Mormonism places a lot of pressure on its members to do and be a lot of things. It can be overwhelming.

Yes. I think this is true in any faith that puts a lot of pressure on people to conform. Most people adapt themselves to that pressure and conform or they leave the Church, but a small percentage of people find themselves caught in the middle in a way that either destroys them or transforms them into a kind of juggernaut of violence. I grew up in Provo, Utah, which people referred to proudly and unironically as "Happy Valley." People took great pride in looking on the bright side of life. In addition, we were counseled to only record positive things in our journals so that our memories of things would preserve the good and forget the bad. Well, to be able to do that, you need to repress a tremendous amount, and some of what's repressed is going to bubble up again. The return of the repressed is something that functions both for the individual and for the culture as a whole. After spending a few years looking at violence in Mormon culture carefully, I wasn't surprised that what's repressed causes upswellings of violence, but I was that these up swellings didn't happen more often.

What I find interesting, having grown up around a lot of Mormons, is most times questions that revolve around controversial issues (i.e.: polygamy, temple rituals, etc.) are always answered with a certain vagueness or in a way that blatantly disregards history or fact. Do you feel there is a closed door with some issues in the church?

Yes. Even now that I've been out of the Church for several years if you ask me certain questions about Mormonism it's hard for me not to slip into vague, safe responses. It's much more difficult for me to talk about the sacred and secret elements of Mormonism than you'd think, very hard to turn off the Mormon self-censor, and I think a good part of the intensity of certain scenes in The Open Curtain come from that: I've had to go through an internal struggle to get where I get to on the page, the stakes of which are very high. That self-censor something that you're taught as a Mormon, the presumption being that there are certain things that someone who's been Mormon for a long time will understand but that someone without that commitment won't. But obviously there's something a little cultish about that attitude.

At the same time, I think the vagueness about something like polygamy is indicative of a kind of uneasy truce within most Mormons, a willingness to accept the past that's still partly a denial. At the same time, I don't think Mormons are bad people. Indeed, in my experience exactly the opposite has been the case; they're for the most part good, generous people who really do care about other people and really do want to help. For instance, I'm still Mormon enough that I feel an incredible satisfaction in helping someone move; it makes me happy to help someone in that way, which my girlfriend thinks is somewhat perverse. They're good people but they can be unnaturally gullible (which is what my novel Father of Lies was about) and when you cut through their goodness and gullibility, they're also a very complicated people, simple on the surface but as gnarled as the rest of us when you start to work through that.

In your novel, you touch upon the dismissal and blatant denial some Mormons revert to when confronted with issues or scenarios that are less than positive. In The Open Curtain, Rudd discovers his deceased father seems to have fathered a child with a woman across town. When Rudd comes across letters to his father from the would-be mistress, he confronts his mother about it, who essentially denies any affair or illegitimate child. She tells him, "She was mistaken in the man. We know the truth. There's no reason to speak of this again." There's seems to be a blindness that some members develop in regard to negative situations that would reflect poorly on them as Mormons. Is that common?

I think the extreme quality of her response isn't common, but I do think that some level of denial is very common indeed. I saw it, both as a child and then later when I was in a Bishopric in Seattle (where I was the second of three religious leaders running a large congregation), in the way that Mormons responded to child abuse or infidelity or corruption among local leaders or other things that were difficult to face. I don't think this is particular to Mormonism, by the way, but rather is something quite common to all religions. I just happen to know best how it functions in Mormonism.

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Because Rudd has been living in a religious culture where he's been told how to think and feel about things for so long, he's lost the ability to make decisions for himself. He turns to this alter-ego or other "self" to tell him what to do or who to be. Why do you think Rudd has these issues?

I think it's an extreme response to a subculture that has a kind of internalized split. Mormonism in its day-to-day services seems very Protestant; in its temple ceremonies, it's very ritual and almost pagan at times. You talk about the Church in one way among Church members and in another way to outsiders. And then you try to reconcile that to the ideas and attitudes and mores of American society as a whole, weaving yourself carefully into that fabric as well. And then if you've have a religious structure telling you what to do and what to be, what happens if you lose your faith? Who tells you who to be and what to do then? Maybe nobody, or maybe you start hearing from all that that religious structure has repressed. I actually think that this is the basic American dilemma, at least for our age: the kind of tension between religion and capitalism that dominates American culture as a whole right now creates a way of responding to situations that often seems schizophrenic.

When you live in a religious culture where your beliefs are defined for you and where there constant pressure to live up to the image that the church has, it can be easy to crack under that pressure, much like Rudd does.

The more pressure there is, the more likely there is for there to be an explosion. I think religion both can strengthen a person's motivation, reasons for living, reasons for being, that strengthen their sense of themselves and generally make them feel more part of their community and of the world as a whole. But for someone without a core self it can also do the reverse: It can either leave them adrift or can substitute in place of a self and of an ability to choose a rule-bound doctrinaire attitude that ends up feeling very much like fascism.