The Barking Cat

I began working on the material for my memoir, A Door in the Ocean, many years ago, way back in the year 2000. I was deep into the stories that would one day turn into my first fiction collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow, and back then I believed I was a dyed-in-the-wool fiction writer. I never considered that I had a life worth writing about, and like a lot of fiction writers, I’d been raised on the idea that nonfiction wasn’t the stuff of literature. There’s a long tradition of such prejudice. Ned Stuckey-French, for example, says, “[Essays] continue to be associated in the minds of many readers with fish-wrap journalism. They are seen as a product of memory and reporting rather than imagination and intellect.”[i] And when it came to memoir—the personal essay’s slutty cousin—the criticism was even fiercer. In a 1994 essay published in Harper’s magazine, William Gass had whined, “Why is it so exciting to say, now that everyone knows it anyway, ‘I was born . . . I was born . . . I was born’? ‘I pooped in my pants, I was betrayed, I made straight A's.’”[ii]

It’s hard to get more damning than that.

In the summer of 2000, I began to assemble materials for a class on Rhetoric and Writing a the University of Utah. The class would focus on contemporary Utah criminals. I’d lived in Salt Lake City for about a year by that point, and like a lot of people I saw Utah as overwhelmingly homogenous and excessively wholesome—an image so many of my students were invested in upholding. So I wanted to mix things up and try to show the students that Utah’s history wasn’t so squeaky clean. I knew Ted Bundy had spent time in Salt Lake City, for example. I also knew about Gary Gilmore – who’d murdered two young men in Provo in the 1970s and was the first person sentenced to death in the United States after a decade-long moratorium on capital punishment – from Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song. As I began searching for articles and documents, I came across an essay by