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“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.

Proposition 8, the 2008 California ballot initiative that overturned the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage, looms large in volume 3 of Carol Lynn Pearson’s diaries. The intense lobbying in favor of the measure by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints caused widespread protests against the church and rifts within congregations, families, and friendships that felt like they might never heal. Pearson documented it all. 

When she learned through friends close to church leaders that members of the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles were shocked by the backlash, she wondered, “How do 15 prophets, seers, and revelators not see this coming when the rest of us did?”

A lifelong feminist, Pearson’s diaries also reveal her concerns for gender equality. She chronicles her observations of Ordain Women, a movement by a group of Latter-day Saint feminists who lobbied to change the church’s all-male priesthood. At the end of this volume, Pearson takes on yet another issue: the ongoing Mormon doctrine that polygamy is practiced in the eternities. Pearson heard from thousands of women who feared that they would be forced to share their husbands in the afterlife. The pain of these women propelled her forward into her next book project, challenging the doctrine of “eternal polygamy.”

Even as she faced her own struggles, Pearson buoyed up those around her. She took phone calls, answered letters, and comforted visitors who were hurting because of the church’s policies. She was, for many, a symbol of hope. 

This fourth and final volume of The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson is full of contradictions as it covers turbulent world events and intimate details in her life. Pearson remains a beacon of light and hope for many, even as she struggles with her own sorrows. 

She embarks on a new project that consumes her: the Latter-day Saint doctrine that polygamy will exist in the afterlife. Pearson also continues to document contemporaneous events in the modern history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including the church’s November 2015 policy that discriminated against LGBTQ+ members and their children. She has both a grassroots perspective as a member of a California congregation and special insight into the decisions of LDS leadership, thanks to friends who keep her informed of what’s happening at the highest levels of the church.

Through it all, Pearson mourns when she says goodbye to longtime friends who die. In July 2026, after she completed her diary project, death finally came for Carol Lynn Pearson after 86 years. Her unique voice cannot be replicated.