Phyllis Barber

Phyllis Barber was born in 1943 and grew up in Boulder City and Las Vegas, Nevada. For this book, Barber won the "Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction".

Barber is obviously a talented writer, and some of the things she writes are quite striking. I was particularly impressed by this paragraph in her story about a talent show in a local congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

"I felt two sensations as I walked off the stage: an indiscriminate one related to the harsh tones of Sister Floyd's voice, the liver-spotted hand curving around the neck of Brother Higginson's violin, Brother Frost's cold hands, my father standing alone in the audience, and his words about pride; the other was a sense of rare coldness in the Boulder City Ward in the desert in Nevada. Like words and snow falling on our heads as we tried to sing and play. Little people in a giant snowstorm, walking through white, hidden by a thick curtain of flakes. Potential stars trying to shine in the broad daylight and in the snow. The snow piling high, lulling everyone to sleep beneath its blanket. When we open our mouths in our dreams to sing pure high notes, to purse our lips on a brass mouthpiece, or to steady our bow hand, more snow falls. Our tongues and our mouths and my hands slow in the cold. The sound freezes." (p. 44)

And I must say that her book was interesting. So, what's my beef with it? Well, for one thing, her creative nonfiction was just a little too creative for me. I guess a reader should overlook the unlikelihood of an autobiographer's claims to be able to recall minute details that occurred thirty years in the past, so I won't harp on that. But Barber is prone to take off on Walter Mittyesque flights of fancy. On page 16, all of a sudden her mother and her uncle are punishing her for her disobedience by making her sleep on a bed balanced on cables thousands of feet above Boulder Dam.

The main thing I disliked about the book was how low an opinion Barber seemed to have of the religion she was indoctrinated with in her childhood. My perception is that Barber's presentation of that religion through the eyes of a child (herself) is a vehicle for pointing out the childishness of it. Much of the religious dialogue seems stilted, and all the emphasis is on the strangeness of religion. An inapt chastity parable Barber was taught in an MIA class is an obvious target for her. One can admit that her account has a degree of truthfulness, while simultaneously wondering if there weren't some sincere, effective, and edifying moments in her religious instruction that in some way helped balance things out.

Barber apparently found the idea of obedience to be stifling as a child. I wish that all people who feel likewise could read Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.'s Not the Way It's Supposed to Be. Plantinga's description of "Shalom" (pp. 9-12) and the "spiritually sound person" (pp. 34-35) are about the best refutations I've ever read of the idea that righteousness is boring.

As an addendum to this review that I actually wrote a long time ago, I should note that Barber's recent self-description says that after "a 20-year hiatus from Mormonism" she has "decided to return to her original religion".… (altro)