"It came to me as an extraordinary gift," Judith Freeman said of her fiction in remarks before a reading on 30 May 1996, "and not one that I thought I would ever be given. Not one that I knew that I had, for a very long time." Freeman might best be described as a Mormon expatriate unwilling to forget her roots in the mountain West, both the rich and healing physical and emotional landscape and the "family attractions" of the Utah Mormon culture that nourished her, even though she early found that culture's "beliefs . . . quite confined to a particular view" that tended to level the rough complexity and amazing beauty of the world. In a letter of 6 November 1997, she acknowledges "a schism" in her psyche:

I am a Mormon by birth: I am of that culture, but no longer a part of the religion. I miss being a part of...