“I feel somehow that of all the writing I am doing, my diary is the most important.” So wrote the beloved and bestselling author, poet, and playwright Carol Lynn Pearson in her 1979 diary. Several years before, she recorded, “I feel the imperative of history. . . . Add that to my being a household word to many and I cannot escape the feeling that in many years there might be a number of people interested in these pages.” That time has now come.  

 Unbeknownst to almost everyone but herself, Pearson kept a near-daily diary since she was a teenager, recording her remarkable story in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mormon America. In this first of a four-volume series, Pearson chronicles her love for her church but also her troubling experiences and concerns with its patriarchy, historic doctrine of polygamy, omission of a feminine divine, and homophobia. Readers will rejoice with her as her first book of poetry, Beginnings, sells an astonishing 150,000+ copies and puts her on the map in the 1960s, empathize with her as she watches her church help kill the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and mourn with her as her mixed-orientation marriage ends and she cares for her former husband in her home as he dies of AIDS in the 1980s. The sensitive-girl-turned-strong-woman who emerges in these diaries insists that we move from patriarchy into partnership, change our destructive policies towards Queer people, and invite God the Mother back into our heavenly family.

Of these years of her life, poet, writer, and feminist Carol Lynn Pearson says, “The plot thickens, as all good plots do. My life and your life—if we are brave enough—move into areas that we had not anticipated. We feel sometimes that we want to run back to safer ground, but life has decided otherwise and so we take those next steps. Volume two of my diaries gives us a closeup of the years 1990 to 2002, bringing us an abundance of both joy and distress.”

Throughout the 1990s, Pearson records and laments her church’s efforts to punish scholars and activists while celebrating the success of her books and one-woman play, Mother Wove the Morning. Along the way, she comforts the suffering, endures terrible personal loss, and witnesses the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11. “Bless everyone who fights for what is right,” she writes.  Few have fought harder than Carol Lynn Pearson.