Recollections 1967-2004

‘The First Generation‘

In the shadow of the 1968 uprisings, a Latter-day Saints missionary family from Utah moves to Paris to start a new life. The patriarch George Sawyer has transferred to a position in the French division of his international mining business conglomerate, mostly to accomodate his French wife, Hélène, who is suffering from anxiety and misses her homeland. They also engage wholeheartedly in Mormon community and missionary activities led from the Mission Home in Paris.

Their young daughter Deborah is caught between cultures and soon led astray by her irascible French cousin Sophie, who studies at the Nanterre – the nexus of the coming student riots. A pregnancy out of wedlock lead to a break with her father and Deborah has to adopt away the child and then journey alone back to America where her uncle and aunt care for her until she can start literature studies at CUNY in New York, hoping to become a teacher and a poet.

After 10 years of non-glamorous poetry pitching and waiting tables in New York city, Deborah meets and falls in love with the Scottish commando soldier, Calum McDonnell when they meet during one of Calum’s instruction courses for marines in the US. They move back to the continent and Deborah believes she will now start over in a perfect romantic setting on Calum’s childhood island of Skye. They have a daughter, Caroline (Carrie) in 1979.

However, the Falklands War intervenes, Calum is crippled and his army career in ruins. He starts drinking and after a decade of on and off attempts to repair the marriage Deborah has to give up and file for divorce. She moves back to her uncle and aunt’s home city of Cleveland and Carrie starts in a US high school while Deborah survives on teaching sub jobs.

The tragic suicide of Carrie’s best friend, Adeline (Lin), pushes Carrie out on a long and dangerous road trip in both South and North America at the end of the millennium, while Deborah – and Calum in Scotland – are sidelined and helpless, until a freak episode brings them into contact again, at a time when Carrie is very close to the edge.

Contemporary stories 2005-2026

‘The Second Generation‘

Carrie becomes clean and gets her greatest wish – her own family. But it is a joy that comes with heavy downsides. She has married the grounded state trooper Jonathan Reese, and they live in Yuma with their daughter Emma and son, Michael, who is diagnosed with autism and takes up most of Carrie’s time and concerns.

Aside from caretaking, Carrie has to deal with anxiety and unemployment, plus an increasingly volatile America with changing political winds and a pandemic on the horizon.

From Los Angeles, Carrie’s mother Deborah and her second husband, IT mogul and New Age guru, Marcus Chen Nianzhen, try their best to help out the Reese family, although not seldom in a tone deaf fashion that puts off both Carrie and Jonathan and creates a series of conflicts.

Across the Atlantic, Carrie’s father Calum is ageing and considering how to deal with that and his past demons from the Falklands War, and in Normandy the family’s Latter-day Saints matriarch Hélène – Carrie’s grandmother – is nearing the end of her long and eventful life.