Immortal for Quite Some Time reads like a fraternal love letter, an apology, and a reckoning. Scott Abbott is wise enough to know that the only story he can really tell is his own. And it is a fascinating, raw, and honest exploration of the intellectual, emotional, and political conflicts that have made him the man he is today.
Rough Ghosts
As all good personal nonfiction is, [this book] isn't really about Scott Abbot, but rather about what it means to grow up in a culture that is so overwhelmingly shaping that it 'informs even your sentence structure' and then to find that you no longer want to have a place in it.
Scott Russell Morris, Immortal Dialogue
This book is, in my opinion, the world's most perfect obituary. . . 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.
Brooke Williams, 15 BYTES
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
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 and coauthor of Saving Alex
About the Author
Scott Abbott is professor of humanities, philosophy, and integrated studies at Utah Valley University. His books include Fictions of Freemasonry, Repetitions, Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary (with Zarko Radakovic) and Wild Rides (with Sam Rushforth).
Table of Contents
1. Autopsy
2. Incalculable Territory
—John’s Green and Tan Notebook #1
3. I Try to Be Myself...as Well as
—John’s Yellow Notebook #1
4. Variations on Desire
—John’s Blue Notebook
5. Horror Vacui
—John’s Green and Tan Notebook #2
6. Our Feet Are the Same
—John’s Blue and Tan Notebook
7. Denouncing the Xenophobic Country I Still Love
—John’s Yellow Notebook #2
8. Home Again
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
