The Vitaly memoirs, told in order

An orphanage in Chernivtsi, in a Ukraine that had just stopped being the Soviet Union. I was abandoned at six and raised behind iron gates. The winters were cold enough that I wore a hat, gloves, and a scarf around my mouth, even inside. Yes, indoors. It was less a style choice than a heating plan.

The yard was a place you did not leave without permission, and a boy was left to work out how much of himself he was allowed to want. That question runs through the whole book, and it is the one the next three books keep asking in different rooms.

I first published it in 2022 under the name Vitaly Magidov. It runs 386 pages and is already in its second printing. A third edition is in preparation as The Boy Behind Iron Gates, reissued under my own name, revised and expanded with the Ukraine of my childhood restored to the page.

This is Book One of four, told in order: the boy, the missionary, the marriage, the dream. It is also where the folder of documents begins, the one that decided more than I did.

Who it is for

Readers who want the story from its first page, and anyone who has wondered what an orphanage childhood in post-Soviet western Ukraine looks like from a boy's height. I do not write trauma for its own sake. If a scene is in the book, it is because it is true and it moved something.

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“The winters were harsh and biting cold... even inside, I would wear a hat, gloves, and a scarf around my mouth.”

A boy with no family joined the church to find one. For two years, it worked. This is a gay LDS missionary memoir that runs from a Ukrainian orphanage to the England London Mission, 2002 to 2004.

It is not a story about leaving the church. It is a story about entering it, and about what it gave and what it asked. I think joining something on purpose is rarer than leaving it, and it gets fewer jokes, so I am giving this one a few.

The book holds faith and identity at the same time and does not pretend to resolve them. I write the parts people skip, and this book is no exception.

It is part of the Elder Magidov series, and the second of the four books I tell in order. The manuscript is drafted. I have not promised a date, and I would rather leave the date empty than fill it with one that does not exist.

Who it is for

You want a missionary memoir that is not only about leaving. You are interested in faith and identity held at the same time, not resolved. You read Book One and want to know what came next.

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No opening lines are published yet. The first pages go out by email when this book has a date.

I landed at JFK on the fifth of August, 2005, with three dollars, a bandura, and a folder of documents. Eleven years later a stranger across a desk decided whether the man I had married counted as my husband. This is the decade between.

Love arrived in May 2006 with two careful messages and a dollar movie ticket, the cheapest line item in the whole file. We married in San Diego on the fifteenth of August, 2008, two years to the day, with a certificate that was proof we did not wait for permission. It then took the fall of DOMA in 2013 before the rest of the country agreed.

Three questions drive the book. What does it cost to be believed, not by a lover but by a government? Who wrote the script: marry young, raise children, retire? Does love live after the storms, or through them?

I could not find the book about coming out and immigrating at once, where the two processes make each other harder, so I wrote it. The manuscript is finished: 51 chapters and 122,703 words. Six complete chapters are free to read in the page. No publication date is set.

Who it is for

Readers looking for the book about coming out and immigrating at once. Readers who want to see what a government interview room looks like from the chair. Anyone who has stood in a line holding a folder and hoped it was the right folder.

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“The soft hum of my laptop is the only sound in the room as midnight settles across the windows.”

A company, a book, a body, a marriage. This is the decade after the green card, when everything I had built was tested at once. Four subjects, one tangle, and no tidy chapter order to hide behind. I am learning to live with that.

Its title is the last line of the book before it. In Green Card, Gold Ring, I ended as though the hard part was over. Life does not care where you place your endings, and this book is where I admit that out loud.

The ending is written, even though the middle is not. It is a real voyage: eleven nights out of Seattle, Alaska, September 2025. The ending is finished. The middle is still negotiating.

I live in Salt Lake City now, and the middle of this book is still being written there. The title is not final, and no date is promised. It is finished when it is finished.

Who it is for

Readers who finished Book Three and want to know what came after the green card. Readers who like to see how a life gets rebuilt once the paperwork stops being the plot.

Look inside

No opening lines are published yet. The first pages go out by email when this book has a date.