Charity Shumway introduces her novel Bountiful, recently published by BCC Press.
One of the things people often say about red versus blue (not unfoundedly) is that the divisions are so deep that people sometimes don’t even really know anyone on the other side. But that’s not my experience. Plenty of my family members and friends, people I love and adore, are firmly on the side opposite me. Sometimes we’re holding hands across the divide. Sometimes we’re glaring at each other from a distance.
And what’s especially interesting to me is that for lots of my loved ones, our LDS experiences are at the heart of our politics. So how do we take those shared beliefs and come to such different conclusions?
That’s what Bountiful is all about. You have Nedra and Doug Walker and their five grown children. Nedra, a lifelong homemaker and piano teacher, feels a call to run for local political office. She’s a devout conservative. Her middle daughter, Heather, 30 and single and freshly returned to Utah after graduate school, would definitely call herself a liberal. And yet when her mother asks for help with her campaign, Heather can’t help but say yes.
So there’s “capital P” Politics. But more interesting to me, actually, are the “little p” politics of how the women navigate their way through LDS culture. Nedra’s experiences as a bishop’s wife, busy mother, and auxiliary leader are very different from Heather’s life in the singles ward scene. How does that then shape their outlook on everything else?
I very much hope Bountiful appeals to LDS readers, but I also wrote it so it would be fully accessible to a general audience. That’s a hard balance. I didn’t want to leave anything out just because it requires explanation, but oh, does it require explanation. What’s General Conference? What’s a Stake President? Linger Longer? Uh, tell me more! Since the characters’ faith isn’t incidental to the plotline – it is the plotline – all that had to be in there. But even for LDS readers, “LDS experience” is also obviously far from monolithic. Even if you don’t need a definition for “YSA,” that doesn’t mean you know how the character Heather Walker feels about her ward. So although there are enough explanations that you could hand the book to anyone, it all comes through the point of view of either Nedra or Heather, which I hope makes it an equal pleasure for insiders and outsiders.
Faith and politics are the sort of subjects that everyone is super comfortable talking about all the time, so I’m sure no one will have any feelings about this book. Haha, just kidding! But I do hope the story of these characters is a way for readers to access the world of the people and places I know and love best.
Above all, my hope is that whatever readers bring to Bountiful, whether it’s a lifetime of LDS living or a passing curiosity, they’ll come away with a better understanding of people like the Walkers, a family with people on both sides, all trying their best.
Charity Shumway is the author of the novels Bountiful (BCC Press, 2020) and Ten Girls to Watch (Washington Square Press, 2012). She earned an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University and a BA in English from Harvard College and graduated from Viewmont High School in Bountiful, Utah. She and her family now live in New York.