Our People     

My sister’s life was characterized by unexpected highs and frightening lows. She was not manic-depressive, but she could climb in a few months from Raggedy-Ann helplessness to courageous independence. I felt at these times timid and purposeless by comparison.

Julia was for most of my life a central presence. Without my mother’s special care and devotion to me throughout my years in Utah and beyond, and without many later professional breaks, I could have lived something like Julia’s tormented life and died her death. The odds always seemed to be against her. Our closeness as children made it inevitable that her early death would shatter me.

The Real Julia

Once in 1944, when Julia was working as a nurse in Boston and I was teaching elementary math at MIT, I came into my apartment in Felton Hall and found her napping on my couch. She looked so beautiful, yet so vulnerable and fragile, that I felt like bursting into tears. I already knew that she was never at home in the flesh, and even now she seemed to be more spirit than body. I had come east to get as far away from my Mormon family and environment as I could, and yet within two years my sister had followed me, perhaps her closest friend, to study nursing at Yale. I knew she would be lonely and frightened in the East, but I feared her dependency on me, just when I was beginning to forget my past and enjoy more freedom. Her training at Yale’s School of Nursing and her later work as a visiting nurse in Boston’s poverty-stricken North End, were extremely taxing for her. She always seemed to be unhappy, complaining about a succession of health problems. She had not been able to break away psychologically from the family that had injured her, and she sought far more companionship and solace from me than I was prepared to give. I was resentful of her neediness.

But now I felt that the attractive young woman before me on my couch was entitled to far more affection than anyone had ever given her. Startled by her apparent emotional instability, I wondered how she could survive life away from home. When Julia awoke, I soon forgot this brief vision and its claims on me. As the children of difficult parents, the two of us seemed to have made a secret pact: we would always be there for one another in an emergency. Only rarely did I live up to my part of this unspoken bargain.

My sister’s fondest experiences must have been in her earliest years, when she would say, “Daddy feed,” and my father would take her on his lap and make a fuss over her. Until she left home at age 22, he called her Papa’s Pet and Grand Love. I never recall his saying her name except in baby talk, “Juyia.” Both she and father retained detailed memories of their childhoods. Although unhappy, they seemed to have lived most vividly when they were young, and in many ways they never grew up. Even as a middle-aged woman, Julia never lost her little girl’s voice.

From the beginning, mother seemed to underrate Julia, as though she believed in the Mormon theory of male superiority. She herself had been unhappy and lonely as a child in a male-dominated family. My sister knew that mother openly favored her sons, and she clearly resented it. Our father’s long absences must have made her feel doubly betrayed, since he had been her closest ally when she was a child. As a result of our mother’s preferences, Julia was frequently petulant and rebellious. When Julia acted up, mother would at times speak of her as though she were a creature from a fairy tale—Sally Black Lady. This wounding label struck deep and hurt her for years. Julia was simply fighting for something more than a toehold inside the family, for words or gestures that would convince her that she was loved.

In our early years, when the family took short walks together on the Capitol grounds, Julia often sulked and lagged behind, and mother would call out, “Sally is in her blackest mood today. She doesn’t want to be part of the family.” I winced at this rebuke and name-calling, motioning to her to catch up. I was, however, too dependent and afraid to say anything on her behalf. I knew how to be a good little boy—too insufferably good for my younger sister to compete. I’m sure that I pointed out all of father’s faults to Julia before she was aware of them; and when she too withdrew from him, she became further isolated. We two played very amicably when alone, and we spent many latchkey months and years together. During this period, we became close friends, and I still think of our companionship fondly. Our family compulsion to work had been dinned into our ears by Mormonism and one of its central hymns: “Put your shoulder to the wheel, push alo-ong, / Do your duty with a heart full of so-ong. / We all have work, / Let no man shirk....” The Mormon symbol for industriousness is the beehive, and mother and the Church tried to see that Julia and I were always busy bees.

Julia was an awkward girl, dressed by mother inappropriately in a fashion of earlier years. In her youth, Julia had the unbecomingly full-face that mother had also had when she was a girl. Julia’s schoolmates, as her mother’s childhood friends had done, occasionally called her “moon face,” and other unpleasant names. These cruel comments obsessed her. Although Julia was of average weight, she grew up convinced that she was fat. I don’t recall her dating or having a steady boyfriend in all of her school years. Finally in her later teens, when I was at the university much of the time, Julia and mother became closer friends. They would talk long and seriously in the evenings—my mother lying in bed, resting her back and legs, and listening sympathetically. My sister, filled with the triumphs and sorrows of the day, would kneel by her bedside. On occasion I would hear her sobbing softly while mother comforted her. Unfortunately, this companionship came too late. I think mother remained baffled by her daughter’s inability to cope, her never fully knowing who she was or what she wanted. Julia later became an excellent student at the University of Utah, however. She chose the catch-all major, sociology, and was in her senior year elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

In Julia’s early adolescence, mother tried to steer her, like me, toward a career in the “helping professions.” Mother would repeatedly advise her daughter and her nieces, “Get your career started, and then you can think of marriage.” One childless cousin told me later that she regretted following her Aunt Claire’s advice. In Julia’s last two years at the university, mother pressured her into becoming a nurse, since she did not feel that Julia was strong enough to become an MD. Although terrified of leaving home, Julia finally agreed, against her own desires, to go east to study at the graduate level at Yale. She earned her Master’s degree, and subsequently practiced for nearly 20 years in both East and West. Unluckily, several of the head nurses for whom Julia worked were even more dominating than mother.

After Yale, she came to work in Boston because I was there. As a visiting nurse, Julia saw human life at its most desperate in Boston’s slums in the North End. This spectacle of misery horrified someone who had always been shielded from the world. Although she ached for more company, we saw each other rarely. I was totally engaged in a world of new friendships that awakened and stimulated me. I resented Julia’s presence, her loneliness and her inability to adapt to my friends and my new way of life. I was in a snobbish phase and disliked her reminding me of our provincial background. In 1948, only four years after she had come east, Julia decided to leave New England and move to California—to which our parents had moved a few years before. I was too relieved to blame myself for not spending more time with her, indeed at times for ignoring her.

In California in the early Fifties, Julia finally found the strength to leave our parents’ home and live alone or with companionable female roommates. They even traveled with her to Europe and Hawaii. By then, Julia had worked with considerable satisfaction as an elementary school nurse for several years in Los Angeles. But in the late Sixties, her position became increasingly troublesome for her. She again found herself working under female supervisors who badgered her as her mother had, making her physically and psychologically ill. She frequently caught colds from the children she treated. One winter, she contracted serum hepatitis during a blood transfusion, and it resulted in a weakness from which she didn’t seem to recover. She claimed that doctors couldn’t help her and began to see them less frequently. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this loss of hope for her recovery was the beginning of her long decline. In those years, I rarely considered my many colds and stomach troubles to be psychosomatic, and Julia never did.

Contrary to her mother’s wishes, Julia said that she had always wanted to stay home with a (ardently imagined) good husband, not try to make a splash in the world. But because of her self-doubts, she continued to have difficulty meeting suitable men. I think that her fears of sexuality were far greater than my own. Once, she nearly drove off the road when on the way to meet a date, an occasion encouraged by her therapist. Mother had so frightened her with tales of the horrors of childbirth that Julia felt she would never be strong enough to bear children. When she was in her early 30s, and still living with our parents, father introduced her to a rather flighty young Mormon named Ralph Alston. With father’s enthusiastic encouragement, the two were soon married. Ralph abandoned her within a year, and she sank into a deep depression.

In 1959, Julia and mother vacationed together and came east to visit me at Smith College. To make up for all I felt I hadn’t done for them, I filled their schedule with so many events that my sister became disoriented and exhausted. From her point of view, my cultural itinerary was merciless—plays, musicals, and other performances in Tanglewood, Boston, and New York, to be followed by a road trip to the South. Julia had phoned me before their visit to say that she wanted me to accompany her to Florida after mother had left. I was equivocal about the final stage of this trip, and replied vaguely, “Well, we’ll see about that.” Like an X-ray, the crisis that followed exposed lifelong flaws in all of us. On this trip, as in the past, I was willing to subordinate myself to mother’s wishes—but not to Julia’s.

I unwisely delayed the inevitable showdown over Florida until we had nearly finished our travels. I had hoped that Julia would have been too tired to go further. We arrived late one morning at a motel in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. As she removed her coat, mother asked, “Why are we going so far south? My time is running out.”

As though taking the matter for granted, Julia said, “Because Joel’s taking me to Florida.”

I was startled. My vagueness had apparently led to a serious misunderstanding. “Oh, no, I never actually said I would, Julia. I was trying to help you out by going this far south.”

Sitting down on the bed, Julia said firmly, “But that was the plan. You promised to go with me.”

To my surprise, I suddenly realized, as she pressed me, that I simply couldn’t tolerate being alone with my difficult sister. “I never promised,” I repeated defensively, but feeling a long-time and irrational hatred of Florida. “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, Julia. I thought that from here you might be able to continue by yourself.”

Julia looked at me directly, her voice rising, “Joel, how could you let me down like this? You know I can’t go on alone. You simply have to take me.”

“No, he can’t,” mother broke in. “He’s got to take me to Washington to meet Cloy. She’s expecting me. You’re a grown woman, Julia, and you can easily go the short distance to Florida by yourself.”

Julia doubtless saw an old pattern of favoritism re-emerging. “But the whole point of my coming east was to go to Florida with you, Joel. You tried to distract me with your plays and concerts. I went to them for you. Why can’t you do this for me?”

As though speaking the final word, mother said, “Don’t be silly. Take hold of yourself. Joel is going north with me.”

I tried to soften mother’s sharp remarks. “Let’s take time to see this lovely place. Tomorrow morning, we can have breakfast together while we wait for your bus.” I had checked the schedules.

Julia began to cry. “You can’t just dump me in the middle of nowhere. You misled me, Joel. I’ll never forget this cruelty. Don’t bother waiting until my bus comes. I might have known that this would happen.”

“Julia, don’t. Please don’t,” I pleaded.

“She’ll get over it, Joel,” mother said decisively.

When Julia understood that mother and I were inflexible about our own plans, she was devastated. But on a Friday in July, 1959, a day which Julia and I would never forget, mother and I left her—“abandoned” was what she said—both wounding and frightening her. Later, as we drove north, I asked myself, couldn’t I at my age have mediated more intelligently between mother and sister? Why had I let Julia have false hopes? Claire and Joel, together again as always, drove north, and a defiant Sally Black Lady went south—to her doom, she must have thought. My mother had trained me well, I told myself wryly: she knew where her son’s duty lay. I was now reminded by mother’s detachment and coldness of her lifelong insensitivity to Julia’s fears that I had always tried not to see. As we drove, I felt that I’d betrayed my sister. Indeed, I have always thought that this incident was a step toward Julia’s premature demise two decades later.

There was far more defiance, however, in my sister than I had ever suspected. After father’s death later that year, Julia turned slowly, but violently, against the Mormon Church. She was reacting to a lifetime of bitter disappointments related to our family and the Church. For the first time, instead of obeying her parents, she began to think for herself and rejected her entire earlier life. Like me, she had long been eager for more convincing spiritual support than she found among the Saints. Thus, over the next few years, she familiarized herself with the literature of several other churches. She slowly withdrew from her Mormon friends in Los Angeles, and began visiting other Christian churches with more orthodox creeds. Most important, she began to engage in social activities for singles in their 30s and 40s, a group in which she might more readily find male companionship. Finally, she found such a group among the Hollywood Presbyterians, and there she met Donald Nilsen, a sympathetic and thoughtful Scandinavian-American, himself as wounded as she was.

Julia began to date Don, and she eventually married him, soon giving up nursing entirely. I thought that she had finally found in this good man the companion she had longed for. He worked for Lockheed Aircraft and they lived well. While I was in Germany, mother wrote me of a surprising development. Julia had begun to distribute anti-Mormon pamphlets, just as father had distributed pro-Mormon propaganda years before. The Mormonism she had seen through father’s eyes had become as unattractive to her as it had been to me. Julia went so far as to send some of her Presbyterian pamphlets to a few of our Mormon relatives in California and Utah. Her bold gesture was like one of our father’s—dramatic and wildly inappropriate. He and his forbears had devoted their lives to winning converts; she sought to alienate them. The apprehensive young woman who had been afraid to stand on her own feet was now trying to lead a crusade. Julia received only frosty and hostile letters in response from relatives who thought her mentally unbalanced. Her pamphlets and widespread correspondence about her hatred of Mormonism eventually led to her excommunication from the Church. The Mormons still perversely retained this kind of inquisition. I was outraged. But Julia’s anti-father and anti-Mormon campaigning were only the first of her two major life-reversals. She had yet to turn against her mother.

When I first heard of Julia’s rebellion, I took it as a sign of her increasing independence. Although I saw nothing of her since Charleston four years earlier, I admired my apparently transformed sister for thinking for herself and daring to be honest with her pious relatives. I was too preoccupied with my own legal troubles in the Sixties, however, to realize that Julia’s breaking away from both parents and the Mormons was isolating her. I came to understand later that these were also acts of desperation, attempts to free herself and exact revenge against her father. Julia’s lashing out might have begun as a sign of strength, but slowly deteriorated into symptoms of increasing illness. Although her happy years with ever-loving Don sustained her for over a decade, her defiance both reflected and precipitated her decline. By the mid-’60s, after I had moved to San Francisco from Germany, I was amazed to find a sister possessed of a far stronger mind and will.

After father’s death in 1959, mother’s health greatly improved and remained very good until her middle 80s. The doctors called the woman who had had lifelong health problems “a medical miracle.” But eventually her health too began to decline. In the early Seventies, mother suffered two strokes. Julia and her solicitous husband, Don, sold mother’s house and belongings, attended to her affairs, and then brought her to their home in Glendale to live with them. Mother was now far weaker and bed-bound. Since she was not working, Julia found new strength for the prolonged nursing care that followed, and at first she didn’t seem to mind it. Paradoxically, Julia’s new task gave her purpose, nursing her first and last patient. But I chose not to face what I knew to be true—that my sister’s living in the same house with a mother she had always feared and sometimes hated would cost her dearly. From San Francisco, where I was teaching, I flew to Los Angeles on several weekends and during holidays to look after mother, while Julia and Don took short vacations. When we were all together on one of these visits, I was troubled by the intensity of the quarreling between these two women. With age and confinement, and after her strokes, mother had become increasingly short-tempered and feisty, issuing orders from her royal bed.

One episode was especially chilling. My sister had bought a little white poodle, one of her last living comforts. She would shampoo her pet regularly and adorn her head with bright ribbons. One day, when Julia was feeding Cherie, mother said sharply, “How can you give so much love to a dog? You should only love human beings.” Julia could never answer her mother’s arguments. Within two days, Julia gave Cherie to a friend. I learned about this later, and I was very angry. Mother was living in my sister’s home. How did she dare force Julia to reject one of her few comforts? Julia needed to give and receive affection wherever she could, but mother was becoming ever more deaf to Julia’s wishes. I remember that when I was about eight, I had a dog named Dukie. One day, while he was chasing after me, Dukie was hit by a car and killed instantly. For hours afterwards, I hid in the basement and cried, accusing myself mercilessly. After finding me, mother—clearly not an animal lover—decided that she would never get me another pet. Her decision was totally wrong.

On another visit to Glendale, I again witnessed a cruel fight between mother and Julia. As I had done before, I instinctively sided with mother. Don then asked me to step outside, and said in his quiet way, “Joel, don’t blame your sister. She is at her wit’s end. Your mother has always been far stronger than Julia, and she is now especially demanding.” I began to see how blind I’d been. I had apparently repressed the lessons of the past, especially of Charleston. I then strongly encouraged her and Don to transfer mother to a nursing home. Julia visited every home in the area and chose the best. After mother moved in, Julia continued to monitor her care meticulously, using all of her nursing skills for the last time.

Surrounded by the usual institutional stupidities, mother soon declined mentally and physically. I visited her a few times a year from San Francisco, and I saw that her handsome face retained its nobility to the end. During mother’s last two years, she repeated a prayer over and over: “God give me strength in my body and peace in my mind.” If I had been a believer, my own final prayer would have been similar. Mental tranquility, however, was a goal none of us could attain. Mother died quietly in her sleep in 1975 at the age of 91. But I had lived through mother’s near-death experiences so many times in Salt Lake City that I had no grief left at her small funeral. She had outlived all of her friends. My sister wanted the service to be non-denominational, certainly non-Mormon, but the hired minister never appeared in our tiny mortuary room. It was a farce. Don stood up and made a few polite remarks about a woman he must have hated. Paralyzed by conflicting emotions, none of the rest of us could speak.

As Julia deepened her revolt against father and his unyielding religious attitudes, she became as extreme and rigid in her beliefs as he had been. She soon joined a fundamentalist wing of the Calvinist-Presbyterians in Glendale. After mother’s death, Julia began openly to rebel against her even more violently than she had earlier rebelled against father. Soon this rebellion became pathological, and her health began deteriorating markedly. At each visit, I was more depressed by her increasing weakness.

Abandoning all orthodox medicine, Julia admitted herself successively to two specialized health clinics, the first in Chicago. There she was put on “purging” (really starvation) diets, eating only one or two foods at a time. I recall appalling combinations like boiled cabbage and liver. She lost weight with alarming speed. I didn’t know then that many other patients at Julia’s clinics not only shared some of her own fanatical religious views, but also thought of themselves as fat. Preoccupied with my work, I kept wondering how I could intervene. At the time I was hearing about Julia’s health primarily from her husband Don, who never seemed worried. Julia herself told me very little. While visiting her in the mid-70s, I telephoned one of Julia’s Presbyterian friends who had been visiting her at home frequently. Mrs. Harrison was clearly alarmed about Julia’s failing health. In a soft and confiding voice, she told me that Julia and now even Don believed that her sufferings were all part of God’s plan. Death for true believers in Julia’s new millenarian sect could presumably be glorious, a transformation and exaltation. As lonely mortals have done for 2,000 years, Julia turned to Jesus. Only He could now compensate her for a life of suffering. Without mentioning Don, Julia had once written me that what had long been missing in her life was a strong male presence. The men in her family had clearly not supplied that need and she seemed to be dying for want of it. But now she thought that Jesus could fill that vacuum.

All foods slowly became poison to my sister. After her last doctors had used terms like “psychosomatic,” “phobia,” and “clinical depression,” she simply stopped seeing them. On one of my visits, Julia invited me to go to her church, and I was anxious to find out what was poisoning her mind. I was appalled by the Judgment Day tone of the guest speaker. He seemed to want to frighten his audience with images of Armageddon. Later I asked her own pastor privately whether something, anything, could be done for Julia. I had already sent his church a substantial sum of money—my guilty bribe—to persuade him to do all that he could. He told me cursorily that although he knew of her “case,” there was nothing he could do for someone who was mentally ill. I hoped that he would offer Julia spiritual counsel, assign someone to be with her or help find professional aid. I was bitterly disappointed.

Since my brother Kermit offered little assistance, and Don unquestioningly accepted Julia’s spiritual self-diagnosis, I suddenly felt that I was totally alone in this battle to save my sister’s life. And one day after a phone call in late 1977, in which she calmly told me that she was “preparing to die,” I nearly panicked. I called the UCLA Psychiatric Department to speak to anyone who might be helpful. I was given the names of several specialists, but I had no referring physician. No one would examine, much less admit, a patient as physically ill as Julia, now almost totally housebound. They didn’t even respond to my use of the word “anorexia,” a term just coming into general parlance. After tricking the names out of Don, I also contacted Julia’s former physicians, but they told me that they too had given up on someone who had long since rejected them. Julia seemed to fall into the gap between her doctors’ narrow fields of expertise in medicine and psychiatry. When I told Kermit that Julia’s condition was critical, we discussed the possibility of having her arrested and placed in a hospital or nursing home, where she could immediately be put on a life-giving I.V. But we had no medical contacts in the Los Angeles area, her own husband was totally against us, and the shock alone might have killed her.

Since I was teaching a full schedule in San Francisco, my support for Julia over the next several weeks consisted mainly of telephone calls and letters. Like many of my other life-denials, I was increasingly aware that my sense of crisis had come too late. In a long letter, I apologized for having ignored her needs over the years, and blamed myself for using my career as an excuse for not seeing more of her. I urged her to write down her feelings, to speak on tape—anything that would strengthen her grip on life. My affection for Julia was so qualified by our history of disagreement that I could hardly bring myself to write that I loved her. But I did say so, and I’m sure that she accepted my remarks in the same qualified spirit. However, tempered my love for her was, I suddenly understood how desperately I needed her to survive. In fighting for her life, I felt I was somehow fighting for my own. I feared that I would never forgive myself if I let her die.

Don amazingly continued to believe in Julia’s religious interpretation of her destiny. I knew I should have stayed by her side, fed her broth, held her hand—all gestures of intimacy and tenderness that I still found impossible. Feeling helpless before what I had come to see as Julia’s death wish, I still found that I didn’t want to be close to her. I was ashamed of this feeling. I thought that my childhood nightmares of destruction had inoculated me against the fear of death, but as I got closer to it, I found out that I had been utterly wrong.

As Julia’s view of herself became smaller, her images of Christ as her Savior became ever larger and nearer. Mrs. Harrison wrote that Julia believed that she would be saved by Him in person at the last moment. He would usher her up to heaven in a “great rapture.” Perhaps nothing less than such an act could compensate her for a lifetime of suffering. I thought sadly that none of our believing forbears had ever dared to challenge the Divine (“You must save me!”), as boldly as Julia was now doing. Curiously, although I knew of Julia’s desperate dependence upon Jesus, she had never before spoken of a belief in an afterlife. But now when she most needed Him, I fear she found Jesus increasingly silent and remote.

I talked to my therapist friends in San Francisco, and both of them said something like, “Your sister is going to die soon, Joel. You must face this.” Because I felt that I had done too little, I thought that they were somehow accusing me of complicity in her death. I avoided both of these friends for the next several months. I blamed them, of course, for forcing me to face the inevitable. The ultimate crisis came on my last visit. Three weeks after I had last seen her, I called Julia apprehensively, and she said in a weak voice, “I am very ill, Joel, could you come down?” The next day, when Julia opened her door, I was appalled. Her wasted and twisted body, her dark, staring eyes and skeletal face—all gave her the appearance of a ghoul.

“What on earth has happened to you? Why didn’t you phone sooner? How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” My questions were pointless. Julia didn’t answer, since I had come on much too strong.

“I’m on the same diet, cleansing my body of impurities,” she said simply. “The MDs have been poisoning me for years.”

“But these clinics are not helping you. Are they trying to starve you? Do they even have registered doctors?” Julia lay down exhausted on the couch.

“Julia, something is terribly wrong. You’re only 54, and in the prime of life. Is Don doing all he can?”

“He is very kind and good, Joel,” Julia said.

I wanted to beg for her forgiveness for our family coldness. At a loss for words, I repeated what I’d already written her. “I’ll never forgive myself for letting mother stay with you for so long. You sacrificed your freedom for Kermit and me, Julia. I now see our terrible selfishness. Please, please fight for life. I can’t lose you.”

I knew that if her nursing mother had kept Julia alive for a while, the burden was now hastening her death.

“My minister told me that I won’t get well until I admit that I hate mother. How does he dare say that? He doesn’t even know me. I was so upset by his remark that I told him never to call on me again. Don understands how I feel.”

I was still baffled. “Understands what? Don’s let you starve yourself. You’re not even being monitored by a doctor.”

“Doctors and therapists don’t believe in God and Jesus. They have no faith.”

Julia’s remarks increasingly alarmed me. “Julia, can’t you separate your diet from your religion? Both are harming you. You seem to be fighting against life itself! I need you to live.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand, since you’re probably an atheist yourself. If you ever pray, Joel, pray for me now. I’m frightened. I think you’d better leave.”

I feared that the girl who had been called “moon face” still felt that she couldn’t do enough to scale down her “gross” body, to cleanse it of corruption. She had long felt that flesh itself was corruption.

Although Julia’s body was weak, she still had a will as strong as mother’s. Willing oneself to die inch by inch must be one of the most difficult of human acts. After we sat silently for a while, we both stood up. I kissed her, or rather pecked her cheek in our characteristic fashion, and held her skeletal frame. Julia’s life seemed to be draining away by the moment. She felt almost bodiless. I feared that if I got too close, I might crush her or accompany her into death. Exhausted, despairing, and convinced that I had failed her, I almost bolted from the house. On this last visit, I had been afraid of becoming angry with her or of breaking down totally, placing an even greater burden upon her. I was angry with her for her suicidal beliefs and with myself for my miserly behavior as her brother.

About a week later, Julia died of starvation. Her funeral was held in her church, with a surprisingly large attendance. I went through the ceremony mindlessly, not feeling or responding to anything. A fragile part of me had been sheared off like an ice cliff and fallen into the sea. At home, I went into total seclusion, unable to share—much less comprehend—my violently contradictory feelings, even with my closest friends. Although she was very different from me, I had always felt that Julia was my double—the unfulfilled self that had shadowed me since childhood. After Julia’s death, I felt I had absolutely no right to outlive her, and for a year or so I felt posthumous. Why hadn’t I foreseen that after rebelling against her father, mother and family faith, Sally Black Lady would go the limit and rebel against her seemingly indifferent brothers and herself? I continued for some months to feel that Julia’s act was pulling me too into the grave. I had always felt that I myself was the family’s true Sally Black Lady. After all, I had been called a felon by the law and the press!

Only after Julia’s death did several recent studies of anorexia attract my attention. Belatedly, I discovered that without early professional intervention, no one could have saved her. But this new information did not assuage my grief. To think more clearly about her death, I still had to face and accept the negative qualities of our mother, the powerful woman who had given Julia life and now had apparently taken it away. Shortly after the funeral, Kermit said, “I don’t like to admit it, but after Julia’s long illness, I feel relieved.” Unfortunately, although he lived only an hour away, Kermit had been far less attentive to her needs than I.

In the years of writing this book, I have tried to round out my portrait of Julia by summoning up memories of the few enjoyable times I spent with her during the happier parts of her life. In California, after her daunting nursing experiences in the East, she began to blossom in unexpected ways. In her mid-20s, the fullness began to leave her cheeks, and she developed a handsome and sculptured face, with beautiful brown hair and eyes, and olive skin. Unfortunately, she never acknowledged her own beauty. On my visits to Los Angeles, she began dressing more fashionably and was wearing her hair in an attractive pageboy cut. By her early 30s, Julia had developed a charming social manner and was apparently happy with her friends, as they clearly were with her.

I visited the family once or twice a year in the 1950s, and with each trip I found Julia more outgoing and radiant, far more able to make and keep good friends—then all fellow-Mormons. They seemed to admire her and have fun with her. She liked to be called “Julie,” and her friends happily obliged. I was proud of my good-looking and eminently capable sister, and I could now communicate with her more freely. She was seeing a good therapist, and she was becoming more relaxed in her attempts to escape her mother’s perfectionism. I thought that Julia had been transformed.

I don’t know what misfortunes afterward began to break Julia’s will to live. I’m sure that her early years afforded her an inadequate basis for self-belief. Despite her confident and attractive manner during these years of relative freedom, she was clearly unable to develop adequate confidence in herself. In her later intense religiosity, Julia carried her father’s fanaticism to the furthest extremes. His apparent abandonment of her in youth had undercut her at a critical moment. But in mind and body, she was from her earliest years co-opted by our mother. Five years before Julia died, when she was attending to mother, she saw Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes. In the film, a woman is caught with her husband in a deep sandpit. After struggling for the length of the film, she finally chooses to stay with her husband rather than escape to freedom. After seeing the film, Julia said to me, “I am the woman in the dunes.” Her sense of life as prolonged and meaningless imprisonment rendered me speechless.