A few days ago, I had occasion to talk to a long-time friend (non-LDS, gay, and a literature professor) about his reaction to No Going Back. What, he asked, was the significance of the title, in my opinion? Which led to possibly a longer answer than he had anticipated…
I suppose I should include a spoiler alert here. So, here goes. If you keep reading, you’ll find out about things that happen toward the end of the book. Selah.
A positive review of No Going Back was published in today’s issue of The Daily Utah Chronicle, the newspaper of the University of Utah.
Several years ago, prompted by a non-Mormon friend, I read Angels in America, a set of two plays set in New York City in the mid-1980s, written and performed in the early 1990s, that won multiple awards (including a Pulitzer). The play is largely about homosexuality, AIDS, and political conservatism. Several of the characters are Mormons, though Tony Kushner (the playwright) is not.
My reaction (which I initially posted on AML-List, and which was later published in more polished and expanded form in Irreantum, the journal of the Association for Mormon Letters) was that despite the Mormon characters and some Mormon iconic symbology, I didn’t really feel that the play was about Mormons or Mormonism in any meaningful way. At the time I wrote my reaction (2003), that was a perspective I didn’t see reflected or even much addressed in discussions of the work — bafflingly so, considering that 3 out of 9 main characters are supposedly Mormon.
So I wrote my response, which I’ve decided to repost below, in the hopes that perhaps this will prompt a little more discussion or at least awareness on this issue.
One of my main motivations in writing No Going Back was to stimulate discussion, both about the book itself (hey! I’m an author, I like feedback; live with it) and about the topics it addresses.
Over Christmas break, I drafted a set of questions that I thought might help prompt interesting discussions among readers of my book. Sadly, the notebook where I wrote down my ideas disappeared… So here’s Take 2 at some “official” No Going Back discussion questions. Please feel free to post responses, additional suggested questions, etc. (more…)
On Dec. 4, Rex Goode — a friend of mine from AML-List, who started the conversation years ago that ultimately led to No Going Back — posted a review/essay on his blog about my book and why he’d encouraged me to write it and then endorsed it after it came out. It’s a positive review, and some of the reasons he gives for endorsing the book have a lot in common with my reasons for writing it. And then, poking around his site, I found another essay titled Not Ashamed that I think may speak even more directly about ways that we Mormons need to change and how I hope my book might help that change.
Talking with Readers
Saturday, August 28th, 2010One of the best parts of having written No Going Back has been the chance to have conversations with readers of the book: Mormons, non-Mormons, ex-Mormons; literary readers, nonliterary readers, occasional readers; those with firsthand experience of homosexuality, those with secondhand knowledge, and those with little direct knowledge. Partly that’s because I think the themes of the book are important, and I like talking about them. And partly it’s because I find it fascinating — and instructive — to find out what my own writing looks like through other people’s eyes.
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Tags: homosexuality, Jonathan Langford, Mormon, No Going Back, North Star, reader comments, reader responses, readings
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