Signature Books: December 18, 2023.

The same skills that made D. Michael Quinn such a ferocious historian did not similarly serve him as a memoirist.

So much of writing a good biography is knowing what to leave in and what to leave out. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, by way of contrast, sticks to detailing only the evils of slavery in his 1855 memoir. Douglass doesn’t even mention his courtship and marriage until he mentions in passing meeting up with his wife in Philadelphia during their thrilling escape from the South; up til that moment, the reader had no inkling that he was even married. Douglass’s goal was to write an anti-slavery tract, not a romance, so cut out everything that wasn’t about slavery. The result is a lean, tight classic of African-American literature that still gets taught in high school and college classrooms today. Heck, the Book of Mormon itself is filled with laments by its various editors that this account cannot contain “a hundrenth part” of all the dealings of these peoples; they of necessity had to know what to skip.

D. Michael Quinn had no such instincts. Perhaps by virtue of his rigorous training as a Yale-educated historian, paired with his time in the Church History Department under Leonard Arrington when they worked together tirelessly to bring hidden things to light, Quinn is constantly erring on the side of telling too much, not too little. Hence in his long-awaited memoir, almost every single event in Quinn’s life entire, no matter how seemingly mundane, is scrupulously catalogued in almost mind-numbing detail.

This is a shame, because there is a core of a rousing narrative buried in the minutiae of this 500+ page tome. There is for example him recounting his growing-up years as a white-passing Latino in Huntington Beach, CA–a city that had open laws on the books preventing anyone from selling their house to a person of color clear up until the Fair Housing Act of 1968–and hearing all sorts of casual racism from the ward members he looked up to.

There is his mission service in Great Britain at the same time as Jefferey R. Holland, where a GA predicted that someone there present would become an Apostle one day, and he dared dream it might be him.

There is his adult life as a closeted gay man in a mixed-orientation marriage, desperately trying to follow the council of his leaders to simply have sex with a woman to magically make “the gay go away”; that story alone could have been its own book.

There are his repeated clashes with Joseph Fielding Smith and Boyd K. Packer over the direction of his historical research. (As a side note, it is fascinating the way Quinn tries to find something charitable to say about the people who opposed him vehemently–Ezra Taft Benson, Mark E. Petersen, Bruce R. McConkie, Harold B. Lee, Truman G. Madsen, even Boyd K. Packer, the man who almost surely got him fired–with the notable exception of Joseph Fielding Smith, who always comes off like kind of a jerk no matter how generously Quinn tries to treat him.)

Then there is one of the most affecting passages in the book: after his time at the Church History Department, he had dueling job offers in the 1970s from the Utah State University and Brigham Young University history departments. He was apparently fully aware even then that BYU might easily turn on him and fire him over his research one day; yet after much prayer he still felt compelled to accept the BYU offer instead. Knowing the end from the beginning, this is easily the most heart-breaking part of the book, even more so than his actual excommunication itself.

And then there is of course the entire reason to read a D. Michael Quinn memoir in the first place: his infamous firing and excommunication as one of the September Six in 1993, after which he got divorced and struggled through a series of short-term academic appointments that dried up completely by 2005 (the patrons of University Mormon Studies programs had declared him a persona non grata), then juggled debt across multiple credit cards until he aged into Social Security, all while quixotically trying to finish his Mormon Hierarchy book series. He notes with irony that he lost his Church membership around the same time Jefferey R. Holland ascended to the Apostleship. These pathos-filled moments of self-reflection make the book worth reading, though it frankly could’ve used far more of them. One wishes Signature Books had deployed a stronger editor, to cut the fat and separate the chaff from the wheat.

I’m guessing the reason why it was not heavily edited—or at all—was simple respect for the dead: Quinn passed way in 2021, and (per the Intro written by his own son) had been working on this memoir since the late-‘90s, when Signature Book declined to publish it for not being “introspective” enough. It perhaps finally seemed churlish to the editors to not let Quinn tell his own story now that he had shuffled off this vale of tears, so they put the whole thing out, warts and all.

Ironically, the best way to approach Chosen Path is perhaps as a primary historical document, one provided for the reader to comb through for nuggets of historical interest, rather than as a succinct or cohesive narrative. It is in some ways a fitting epilogue from a man who was always first and foremost a historian, one who always sought to reveal the truth–no matter how awkward or uncomfortable it might prove to be–even in himself.