Brady Udall comes from one of Utah's most well-known political
families, but he's ended up following a much different career path. His first novel, The
Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, is a tragicomic account that begins when Edgar, a young
Native American growing up on the edges of a reservation, has his head run over by a mail
truck. Some readers might be skeptical of a young Mormon author's decision to write a
novel rooted in the perspective of a character so radically different from himself, but Udall
finds that line of reasoning unpersuasive."This book isn't about Native Americans or their
culture," he points out. "It didn't worry me at all. I grew up in a place with a lot of Native
Americans on reservations, so I know that country, I know those people, at least from my
outisder's perspective. And what ultimately interested me about Edgar's culture was how he
was divorced from it."
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RH: I've seen a couple different stories about how you started writing this
novel, which got me thinking about how authors pull separate ideas together to
come up with their stories.
BU: What really happened was this: my wife's ex-boyfriend was run over by a
mail truck when he was a kid and left for dead, and the mailman had a nervous breakdown
and disappeared. Now, the story gets complicated because he was still her boyfriend when I
was her boyfriend. She told me about this other guy she was seeing, and of course I was
very upset..then she told me this story, I think to soften me up.Well it did, mostly because I
thought it was such an amazing story. I sought him out and got the story from him. So I
think I did alright--I got the girl and the story. (smiles)
RH: Once you had Edgar's basic situation in place, how did you build upon
it?
BU: That was one of the biggest difficulties of the book, to write a story about a
character I didn't really know or understand when I started writing him. I was writing in the
first person, so it was apparently at some point in his future when he'd developed past these
events, but I didn't know who that older person was, or what had happened to him along the
way. It's a very strange thing to sit down and start writing like that, building a life as you go
along. You make certain decisions, and the ramifications of those decisions cause you, and
the character, to see the world a certain way. But it's a process; I can't imagine a character's
entire life in one sweeping, grand moment.
RH: It's so hard for Edgar to remember, or to know himself, that he frequently
describes his past in the third person rather than the first.
BU: A lot of people thought I was doing that just as a literary device, as a second
narrator, but it's for exactly that reason. He can't remember a lot of what happened to him,
and ultimately he becomes a character in his own story. Most of the time, when we tell
stories about ourselves, we treat ourselves as characters in the story. We're not so self-
involved that we don't understand we have a role to play. He's just aware of that.
RH: You're not afraid to find the humor in what is, on the surface level, a
bleak story.
BU: I had no interest in writing straight tragedy. In a way, it's too easy, too
common. There's so many stories now about people who've suffered some tragedy where
the entire point of the story is, "Look at how bad this character's had it." What interests
me is taking something that wouldn't necessarily be seen as comic material and using it that
way. That's the way I see the world. I can laugh at just about anything, and that might make
me an annoying person in some ways, but it's also sort of a survival technique that makes
life easier.
RH: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
BU: No. I just always knew I wanted to do something that didn't involve heavy
labor. I never conceived of writing as something you could do as an occupation. I thought it
might be something to do to impress myself, coming up with these stories, but it wasn't
until I got to college that I first started thinking I could make a living from writing.
RH: You come from a political family. Did they support your creative efforts,
or try to steer you towards their field?
BU: I never really admitted to anybody I wanted to write! (laughs) When I
wrote a story, I might have shown it to my high school English teacher, but that's about it. I
was even a sociology major in college, never let on that I would try my hand at writing.
RH: You'd published a collection of short stories a few years ago. Had you
been trying to write a novel during that time?
BU: I've known about this story since 1991, long before I started this book. I
knew eventually that I'd write a novel. It was almost a given. I knew I wasn't going to write
short stories my whole life. For one thing, they don't sell. And I think every writer has to
write a novel, or at least try to once. Well, I realize that's sort of presumptuous on my part;
there's a lot of great writers who never wrote a novel.
RH: I can see that you've achieved a personal reconciliation between your
creative pursuits and your spiritual commitment as a Mormon, but for you and
other Mormon artists, friction often occurs with the church hierarchy over the
artist's decision to address some types of subject matter.
BU: Ultimately, my family comes first, before the church, before my writing,
before anything. It can cause me pain when I know that they might be embarassed by
something that I'm doing as a writer, or even ashamed, so at times it's a delicate situation. I
know they're proud of my success, that I'm making it out in the world and getting attention
for my work, but they're also worried that I'm not being a good role model, that I should be
presenting myself as a good Mormon, not this guy writing gritty stories full of swear words
and sex.
But in the end, that's all cosmetic stuff. I can't really feel too bad about it. I know it's
presumptuous, but I hope that my book can offer readers a strong spiritual experience. That
despite all the harsh material, they can still draw inspiration from it.
RH: Every writer depicts the world to some extent as they want it to be, but
they also have to deal with the world as it is.
BU: There's no way around that, or you're being dishonest with yourself and
your readers. Whenever someone in my family, or other Mormons, ask me about that, I try
to explain it, but it hasn't quite gotten through to them yet... (smiles)
RH: When you were starting out, who were some of the writers you learned the
most from by reading?
BU: The writer I learned so much from is Rick Bass. I read a lot of Raymond
Carver and other minimalist writers when I was in college, and to be honest with you, I hated
it,. even though I thought that was what I was supposed to be learning from. Then a teacher
gave me a copy of Bass's The Watch, and it just opened my eyes. He writes in a
vernacular much like Twain did, in great, flowing prose I'd never encountered before. And I
knew right away that was how I wanted to write, that the other stuff I was reading just felt so
unnatural to me. It wasn't how I heard speech, how I understood language.
RH: Have you started work on your next novel yet?
BU: I've been working on it for a while, though I can't say I've written a whole lot
of pages. It's mostly been pre-novelizing so far, the research and all. It's a story about a
modern polygamist. I wanted to do something very different than this book, so I'm going
from a kid who's alone in the world and has nobody to a guy who has everybody.
(smiles)
RH: Well, that'll tackle the friction between your fiction and Mormonism
head on, I guess.
BU: Sure, and it's a situation that lends itself perfectly to humor. What could be
funnier? One of the things American writers do really well, in my mind, is domestic drama...
and what could be more of a family than four wives and twenty-eight children? Now that's a
family!
