IMMORTAL
for Quite Some Time
Scott Abbott has written a unique and amazing book. By turns wrenching, hilarious, deliberative, poetic, and outraged, IMMORTAL FOR QUITE SOME TIME is a narrative meditation about brotherly love, religion, sexuality, and freedom. Anyone who cares about any of those topics (in other words, I hope, everybody) should read it.
----Martha C. Nussbaum, Law School and Philosophy Department, University of Chicago. She is the author of Anger and Forgiveness, Love's Knowledge, Sex and Social Justice, and Philosophical Interventions, as well as Not for Profit, Upheavals of Thought, Creating Capabilities and Frontiers of Justice.
Searching and unsentimental, this memoir and memorial (re)creates a brotherhood, making sense of a life that is past and meaning for a life still to be lived. In re-membering his brother's life--literally putting it back together from scraps of paper and photographs and fragments of memory and story--Abbott reorders his own life, too, making new connections between past and present, living and dead. The result is a luminous testament to both the power and the pain of brotherly love.
----Kristine Haglund, former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
This is not a book. This is a work in the making for quite some time (a little over 25 years). It is the nature of such work to extend itself directly into its maker. Indeed, from the moment Scott saw the remains of his brother, John, he could not get him out of memory. As Scott packed away John’s worldly remains, each object became a trigger setting off images, sounds, and smells that guide and open a way for Scott to move forward. And so, this work came slowly, painfully to surface. Throughout, John’s presence never ceases to disturb, distress, and enlarge Scott’s own life. And Scott Abbott being a writer, what could he do with all this? He writes. And finally, he builds a place for John to come home to. This is not a book.
----Alex Caldiero, author of Some Love, sonosuono, Poetry is Wanted Here, and other books of poetry
By all measures, I found his writing to be engaging, poetic, exploratory, and brave on so many levels. In the search to understand his brother, Abbott begins his own meditations on family, religion, politics, sexuality, betrayal, and the things we carry. It is brave and honest writing.
----Jeff Metcalf, author of Requiem for the Living: A Memoir
Thank you, Scott Abbott, for doing the work that must be done: for being brave and loving and true--to the memory of your brother, to the quietly terrible realities of Mormon family life, to the brokenness of Mormon masculinity and its beauties as well. This book opens the door to a long overdue conversation about the suffering men in our community bear without speaking. I will give this book to the men I love and admire.
----Joanna Brooks, author of Book of Mormon Girl
GLOWING prose, terrible journey, a beloved brother's decline and death - an utterly fascinating time capsule/snapshot of late 20th/early 21st century Mormonism. Above all, this is a travel guide into a future both more expectant of genuinely Christian behavior from an institution with the word "Christ" in its title, but less forgiving of cruelty, obvious mistakes and avoidable failures. If the institution is to survive, literally survive, our new age of ubiquitous information access and lightening scientific/technological advance, Church leaders must learn how to differentiate simple biology (a purposeful oxymoron) from moral failing (perhaps another).
The days-gone-by dark skin/light skin false dichotomy is an obvious clue, unfortunately missed. Here we go again.
IMMORTAL is a new primer on a different subject, conservative authoritarianism's fiery collision with gay liberation.
This is what writers do, dear Brethren, shine uncomfortable light into dark corners, even yours. That's' a good thing. Sometimes it's the only thing.
I read IMMORTAL between Yanagihara's extraordinary A LITTLE LIFE and one more go through GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. Sui generis, it not only stacks right up but inhabits the same spaces. I was always absorbed, frequently delighted (mom's shower curtain revelation, for example, something Wes Craven himself couldn't, or wouldn't[!] have dreamed). Scott Abbott knows his way around a paragraph, many ring out loud, a sure sign of the artist - ecclesiastically (anywhere) always in short supply, in Mormondom rare, infinitely valuable, holy.
- which, I am aware, makes Scott a saint. Still.
Every day I looked forward to reading this. There's a very good possibility I will read it again.
---pd mallamo, AUTHOR OF PILOT
These responses are generous.
They are insightful.
They understand the book, in some ways, better than I do.
Many, many thanks.
What is Immortal for Quite Some Time, the book from Scott Abbott, the Professor of Integrated Studies, Philosophy and Humanities at UVU? Is it a memoir? Abbott explicitly disclaims this in a preface: “This is not a memoir,” he says, saying the book is a “fraternal meditation on the question, ‘Are we friends, my brother?'”. Yet even that descriptor is both incomplete and misleading, as I’ll discuss. Is the book a collection of Abbott’s pontifications on various LDS topics? Yes, it is that, but it is significantly more than this as well. If a meditation, the book is also incomplete, as Abbott’s book does not necessarily bring a level of mindfulness or self-reflection. Is it a history? It fails at that as well, leaving out key figures and telling us a partial view of major events. I believe that Immortal for Quite Some Time is best viewed as a mystery, in two senses: the author piecing together his brother’s life and what that fraternity means, but also the mystery of the author to himself and to the reader. It is the best book I read all year.
. . .
I don’t mean to sound antagonistic to Abbott or this wonderful, frustrating, troubling, vitally important book. I believe the book shows us the divide in front of us when it comes to understanding other human beings. It shows us that in the quiet heart is hidden sorrow that the eye can’t see, but more than this — in the heart is hidden joy, hidden faith, hidden struggle, hidden sexuality, hidden identity. Everything is hiding there.
for the rest of the review, enthusiastic and critical by turn click HERE
--Steve Evens, BY COMMON CONSENT
A REVIEW BY BROOKE WILLIAMS, AUTHOR, MOST RECENTLY, OF OPEN MIDNIGHT:
The first thing I read on opening Scott Abbott’s Immortal for Quite Some Time was that “This is not a memoir.” I agree. This book is, in my opinion, the world’s most perfect obituary. I’ve been reading them in the newspaper since my mother’s death in 1994, when I realized that most of the people at her funeral had learned that she’d passed by reading her obituary.
Obituaries come in many forms. The long-winded list of an old person’s accomplishments along with his/her progeny; the death notice, spare and sparse with a funeral invitation; the personal note, written by the deceased prior to being deceased; and what I call “the treasure hunt,” a frustrating communique full of carefully crafted clues to a much larger story, intended to help those still living.
I say “treasure” because I believe that everyone has a unique story, which when told well becomes a universal story from which anyone can learn. I say “hunt” because to find the story the reader must fill in the vast and empty spaces between the clues.
And then, there are those obituaries suggesting that the deceased has unfinished business. These days the quantum physicists say that we don’t “end” when we die but go on to occupy another, possibly parallel universe. We can either believe that this is possible or not. I happen to believe it, based on personal experiences for which no other reasonable explanation exists.
Scott Abbott’s obituary for his brother John, who died of AIDS on July 21, 1991, may fall into the “treasure hunt” category except that the number of clues contained in its 256 pages leave, at least for this reader, little unfilled space. It is not frustrating. It is beautiful.
As with the best of this genre, Abbot’s is less about his dead brother than it is about himself. The clues, laid out in journal form spanning most of his life are to a story, a treasure that remains unfinished.
The clues come in many forms. Abbott has included poems, photographs, shopping lists, and menus. There are letters and song lyrics. John’s alarm clock ticks throughout, and dreams are recalled: (In 1989 in Germany, “…a naked man reads into an expanding condom until it bursts—freeing letters and word fragments to conceive monsters, impregnate the universe”.) Throughout the text, there are italicized questions. But from where? His inner critic? (The publisher’s material says they’re from a feminine source, but I’m not sure.)
Most of the clues are contained in Abbott’s concise, sometimes haunting, sometimes poetic journal entries. My sense from the varied content contained in them is that Abbott doesn’t wait for something notable to occur or for an important thought to form to pull out his journal. Rather, he seems to have made journal-keeping a regular practice. The simple act of sitting down with his journal and pen signals his inner world to reveal itself. ENTIRE REVIEW HERE
:::: I happily don't exactly know what to call Scott Abbott's latest, Immortal for Quite Some Time — perhaps what Renee Gladman would designate a Thinking Text. Whatever the right category, it's a wonderfully smart, probing, felt collage of biographical meditations, reminiscences, photographs, voices, quotes, and definitions circling around Abbott's brother's death by AIDS at 40 in 1991; Abbott's own education into the idea of education (often through Germanic literatures: among other things, he's one of Peter Handke's translators); his internal & professional battles with the Mormon church's hypocrisies, contradictions, authoritarian hierarchies, & deployments of shame as a form of control; & the problematics of pastness, simplistic gender boundaries, & that thing we used to refer to as stable identity.
-- Lance Olsen, AUTHOR, MOST RECENTLY, OF DREAMLIVES OF DEBRIS
Harlow Clark's review for the Association for Mormon Letters begins with a quotation from the literary critic Lionel Trilling that then stands, by implication, for the review of my book that follows: “It asks every question that is forbidden in polite society. It asks us if we are content with our marriages, with our family lives, with our professional lives, with our friends . . . It asks us if we are content with ourselves, if we are saved or damned.”
A couple of quotes from the review:
Abbott says, “This is not a memoir.” It’s also not an essay meant to raise and answer the big questions of life. It’s a narrative about professing German literature and trying to achieve the rank of full professor and trying to reconstruct your dead brother’s life and your brotherhood.
And the most important question is one Abbott doesn’t bring up at all, but clearly he’s avoiding or rejecting Kant’s categorical imperative. He doesn’t want to say, “My intellectual and ethical and social commitments led me out of my marriage, out of my job, out of my church, and I ask that my account will lead you along the same path.”
When he starts making these kinds of demands a female voice in boldface comes into the narrative mocking, ridiculing, and questioning his pretensions.
. . .The female voice challenges Abbott’s rhetoric, and in one memorable passage chastises him for feeling morally and intellectually superior to his mother for leaving the culture that rejected her son and his brother. The voice reminds Abbott or the intellectual sacrifices she made for her children and asks what he has sacrificed.
A THOUGHTFUL REVIEW BY AN EXTRAORDINARY BLOGGER ABOUT BOOKS:
someone said, and you don't know exactly anymore who: that those who have never been scared shitless of death aren't allowed to join the conversation, but those who never felt immortal aren't either. a book that takes place in the space between mortality and immortality. it celebrates some frail kind of invincibility of everything, of making peace where one cannot make peace, of finding something that has it in its nature not to be there anymore, to find something in the absence. and yet so much is there. the personal effects of the person, memories, shared things. more than one can make sense of. this book is also more than one can make sense of.
the book is of a different genre, a fraternal meditation, abbot called it, you'd like to call it the longlasting living question genre of books and the question that is living in this book is: Are we friends, my brother?
everyone gets a voice, there is space for disagreement, for opposing views and a lot of uncertainty. can this be true. the meaning of facts and events. do you remember this correctly? one doesn't know so one needs everyone's view. it's like a lived form of nietzsche's view on objectivity, only when you have all perspectives... but you will never have all views...
Es giebt nur ein perspektivisches Sehen, nur ein perspektivisches „Erkennen“; und je mehr Affekte wir über eine Sache zu Worte kommen lassen, je mehr Augen, verschiedne Augen wir uns für dieselbe Sache einzusetzen wissen, um so vollständiger wird unser „Begriff“ dieser Sache, unsre „Objektivität“ sein. Den Willen aber überhaupt eliminiren, die Affekte sammt und sonders aushängen, gesetzt, dass wir dies vermöchten: wie? hiesse das nicht den Intellekt castriren?…
Nietzsche, GM III 12
how do you free yourself. how do you free yourself without getting hurt and hurting others. questions that are not theoretical questions, questions that are lived instead, with often longlasting consequences. what if being gay and having aids ostracizes you from your church, from family members. what if your disbelief has a profound effect on your family life. what if your ideas on academic freedom threaten your job. what if your brother dies of aids, all alone, and no one phones the ambulance. what to make of the estrangement, between people, family members, everything. the things one didn't do (for whatever reasons) for the beloved person, while there was still time. how to make up for the bad stuff. it reminded you of something you recently read in christa wolf's letters: there is no clean moral solution you'll end up with dirty hands either way.
how to make sense of who one is, one's past and one's losses, one's fights against authority and all this while time passes, while people get hurt, while one tries to avoid hurting them, while one finds new friends and new love.
how to be good and what does this mean, in the context of the book, how to be good outside the mormon church.
. . . flowerville
A THOUGHTFUL REVIEW BY ELLEN WEIST IN THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE:
Postmortem • Abbott's book begins in 1991 with the description of his brother's body in the mortuary after an autopsy. He observes his younger brother's uneven teeth and feet, both features resembling his own.
In "Immortal," he traces their shared Mormon boyhoods in Farmington, N.M., and their LDS Church missions, and then takes trips to places his brother lived and worked in Boise, Idaho, and San Diego.
He reads his brother's notebooks and carefully considers his possessions, looking for clues about who his brother was. As he regularly changes the batteries in his brother's Miller beer clock, the ticking becomes a presence in the narrative and provides a metaphor for the book's cover design.
As the writer considers the brother he hardly knew as an adult, Abbott also interrogates the way his religion treats gay people. His public challenges about campus intellectual freedom threaten his faculty position at BYU and eventually splinter his marriage to his wife, the mother of his seven children.
"I set out to write a book about my brother, and it became a book about myself as well as my brother," he says, explaining why he's uncomfortable with the label of "memoir." "My book is fragmentary. It requires that a reader put it together in ways that a normal story doesn't."
Perhaps the book's most interesting revelation to the Mormon intellectual community is that Abbott outs himself as the author of an anonymous 1995 Sunstone magazine essay that revealed plagiarism in an address by then-BYU president Merrill Bateman about moral relativism.
The essay prompted national news stories, and according to Abbott's account in the book, Bateman apologized for careless attribution. Just weeks after its publication, the anonymous Sunstone writer was threatened with the curses of Isaiah quoted by LDS Elder Boyd K. Packer during the church's general conference session.
In "Immortal," the dual story of the writer and his brother, like most memoirs, becomes a meditation of memory, which, as Abbott writes, "is a slippery medium. Slippery and malleable."
The years he lived through in writing the book dramatically changed his life and changed his memories of his brother. (An earlier version of the book won the Utah Arts Council's writing competition for creative nonfiction.)
Even as he left behind his BYU job and membership in the LDS Church, he aimed in the writing be fair to the rich culture and belief system that shaped him and his family. (Abbott now is a professor of humanities and philosophy at Utah Valley University.)
In the book, he records a family note from his brother that urged him to accept their mother's faith. "Mom's a person herself. Share her right to believe!" After that, his brother wrote the question that inspired the entire book: "Are we friends, my brother?" "That question undoes me every time I read it," Abbott writes in "Immortal."
"I guess the shock of his death made me want to do some of the work that a relationship requires," Abbott says. "Which is ironic, because it was in that moment when there couldn't be a relationship." ENTIRE REVIEW HERE
Attempts to Be Whole
Reviewed by Scott Russell Morris
FULL REVIEW IN Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
In Immortal for Quite Some Time, Scott Abbott meditates on his brother’s
death. That Abbott comes from a devoted Mormon family and that his
brother was gay and died of AIDS is the tagline that seems to sell the
book—and this review, too, apparently, as I am writing that first despite
my best intentions—but really, this book is not about his brother John
or about the homophobic culture of the LDS Church and many of its
adherents, despite both of those being common motifs. It is about Scott
Abbott. And, as all good personal nonfiction is, it isn’t really about Scott
Abbott either, but rather about what it means to grow up in a culture
that is so overwhelmingly shaping that it “informs even your sentence
structure” (89) and then to find that you no longer want to have a place
in it. In the last few weeks as I’ve contemplated what I might say about
Abbott’s book and as I’ve discussed it with others (one of whom saw it
on my couch and asked, based on the title, if it was a vampire novel),
I’ve described it in a few ways: It is about a BYU professor who was in
the thick of the academic freedom concerns at BYU in the ’90s. Or, it is
about a brother going through his dead brother’s things and thinking
about what that might mean about the two of them, both nonconformists.
For those more interested in writing and less about the story, I’ve
told them about the most interesting feature of the book: It is written
mostly as a series of journal entries, but there are a lot of other voices; for
example, a female critic consistently questions the stories and rhetoric
in Abbott’s entries, which he responds to in a separate editorial voice.
There are also his brother’s words, at first taken from found texts like
notebooks, letters, and book annotations, but then, toward the end, John
actually speaks from the dead, directly to the narrator, though mostly to
underscore the fact that he no longer has a voice, deflecting questions
by responding, “You can probably answer that yourself,” and “I don’t
really get to answer that, do I?” (207, 202).
Which is all to say that this is a difficult book to categorize. Even the
book itself resists offering an easy categorization: “This is not a memoir,”
the first line declares. “This is a fraternal meditation” (n.p.). Of course,
the publishers still went with “Memoir” on the back cover (because who
types “Fraternal Meditations” into Amazon?), but what these first lines
are doing is setting us up for the fact that we aren’t here for the story.
We’re not here for any salacious details—the details aren’t really that
salacious, at least not from a worldly point of view, though we do learn
that the author, while still employed by BYU no less, drinks coffee and
even orders a beer at a bar, and that he wrote several damning speeches
and articles about Church leadership and received damning letters and
speeches from them in return. No, we’re here instead for the meditation.
Or, as Abbott puts it, “This book is my own therapeutic attempt to dress
John’s body, to feel the rasp of his cold flesh” (150). And though John’s
cold flesh is certainly present in the book, the therapy is much more
present as Abbott asks in various ways how he is supposed to respond
to his brother’s death, to the rigid culture of the Church, to his mother’s
faith, and to so many other little problems in a complicated life, family,
and culture. Later on in the book, in response to the anonymous female
critic’s charge that drinking coffee and not paying tithing will be seen
as “proof . . . of your fall from righteousness” (230), Abbott replies,
“That binary structure is deeply internalized in me: choices are either
good or evil. And you know also that I have been trying to feel my way
to a different kind of thinking” (230). Though categorizing this book’s
publication genre is not what I really want to talk about, I think this
passage and others would clearly place it in the category of the essay,
that genre which is at the core an attempt and a trial, and also the genre
that allows for Abbott’s meandering view and lack of concern for a
coherence of story.
. . .
But this same structure that poses some story problems is also the
key to the most pivotal moments of the book. One passage in particular
struck me as incredibly honest and also intellectually exciting: “I
can hardly write about John’s desires, about the pleasures and consequences
of his choices and needs, without revealing and exploring my
own desires” (92). And throughout the meditations, confessions, and
reflections, we learn a lot about Abbott’s desires and biases: he tells us of
sexual and/or violent dreams, that he struggled against his own feelings
of homophobia, that he longs for a sexual and emotional connection
he is not, apparently, achieving with his wife. But this slow reveal over
time is most rewarding in the epilogue, the part of Immortal for Quite
Some Time I have frequently returned to and reread in the last few
weeks. The epilogue, written in 2015—three years after the last chapter
and fifteen years after the journal entries stop—brings the whole book
together. It focuses on Abbott’s finding and translating a letter John
wrote to a friend on his mission—a friend who apparently knew about
his homosexual desires. John writes, “I am a man and I want to abandon
myself to the pleasure of the body, of life, but at the same time my soul
tells me that I must behave in another manner. How can a person live
this way?” (253–54). Abbott responds in a letter of his own, addressed
to his brother: “When I asked that question at perilous junctures of my
life, the answer was that I could not live that way. That left, of course,
the more complicated issue of how I should live” (254). Though the
question is never really answered—how can it be, especially when each
of us has such complicated desires and aspirations and expectations?—if
the book comes to a conclusion at all, it can be summed up in a line I
have already made into a poster to hang on my office door: “That we are
seldom at our best doesn’t invalidate our attempts to be whole” (255).
That the book is fragmented and that the “characters are in flux, [and]
the voices are plural” (n.p.) shows perhaps that this wholeness is not
really attainable, but that the attempt is still very worthwhile.