Memoir, Mountains, and Mormons

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde declares in “The Decay of Lying.” It’s an idea Liz Stephens might agree with. “I should acknowledge I’ve read too many movies. I’ve read too many books” (33), she writes in The Days Are Gods. Scenes she encounters make sense because she has been taught by art to recognize them: “I’ve seen that movie, the one with the barn in the mountains. I’ve read the book, the one with the treacherous winter” (31). Movies even help her understand her own body: “When I lope and remember not to look down at the horse’s neck, but look out and around at where I’m going, I know the set of my head exactly, because I’ve seen it in the movies” (32).

The Days Are Gods is a memoir told in sections that sometimes feel like chapters that cannot be read alone and sometimes feel like stand-alone but connected essays, especially since they have titles rather than numbers, as is standard for essay collections. It is both a meditation on the West and an account of Stephens’s life in the Cache Valley, where she moves to attend graduate school at Utah State University in Logan. The life available to her there is appealing, she tells us, in part because “I am looking for a set of stories to inhabit. Shocking and shallow as that may sound, extremely Generation X, adrift on the world and looking for someone else’s story to live—well, let’s just get it out there. How wrong, or right, is what I’m doing?” (34). Eventually, she apparently decides it’s wrong, declaring, “I resist thinking of this new life in terms of its story-generating potential. I do” (121).

There’s plenty of story-generating material in Stephens’s life. Lush by the standards of the American desert, the Cache Valley sits between branches of the Wasatch Mountains, with peaks so high they are snowcapped for all but a few months of the year. Stephens and her husband, Christopher, buy a house on a large lot in Wellsville, a small farming town/bedroom community eight miles from Utah State. They keep horses and raise goats and chickens. They explore their new home with the three dogs, a Great Dane and two dachshunds, that they brought with them from Hollywood.

The book is at its best when discussing the animals. The Great Dane and one dachshund become so ill and infirm that they must be put down; Stephens’s grief over losing and burying them in a place she must eventually abandon is beautifully described. After watching a man shoot a pheasant, a dog retrieve it, and a falcon open the pheasant’s chest so that the man can gut it, Stephens observes, “it is surely true of all animals, and all conscious people, that the pain we inflict on each other is in some ways due process for living in the world” (64), a wise insight fully earned by the experience she describes.

But many of Stephens’s observations are not earned— or even really warranted. Stephens repeatedly assumes that she knows other people’s thoughts and minds—sometimes better than they do. She writes, for instance, “My neighbor Corey, ten years old, doesn’t know yet that he will remember riding his horse every day of the summer...but I already know he will” (101). What power tells her that Corey will remember riding his horse, and that she knows this but he does not? I could quote many other examples of this rhetorical turn, but I’ll limit myself to the most important: Stephens writes that when she first tells her husband she is pregnant, he “put down his wrench and a motorcycle carburetor for what surely in that moment must feel like it will be the last time...