Vitaly Kirkpatrick

Book Two · Drafted

The Family I Went Looking For

A boy with no family joined the church to find one. For two years, it worked.

A gay LDS missionary memoir, from a Ukrainian orphanage to the England London Mission

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Cover of The Family I Went Looking For by Vitaly Kirkpatrick

About this book

It is not a story about leaving the church.

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.

Door to door, England

What this one is made of

Four things, all true at once.

  1. Family

    Admit one · Book Two

    A family, found

    An orphan with no relatives of his own, adopted into a structure of companions, mission presidents, and members who called each other brother and sister and meant it.

  2. Mission

    Admit one · Book Two

    A mission, worked

    Two years in the England London Mission — door to door, companion to companion, baptism to baptism. Not a story about doubt. A story about it functioning.

  3. Belief

    Admit one · Book Two

    A body of belief

    A patriarchal blessing that promised a family, and a testimony given honestly, while carrying something the blessing did not leave room for.

  4. Later

    Admit one · Book Two

    The wound, later

    What happens after two years of it working — not on page one, and not the whole book.

Elder Magidov series. Known on the mission by his nametag.

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.

Look inside

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

Read this if…

  • You want a Mormon-missionary memoir that is not only about leaving.
  • You are interested in faith and identity held at the same time, not resolved.
  • You have read Book One and want to know what happened after the orphanage.

Maybe skip it if…

  • You are looking for a straightforward institutional-critique memoir.
  • You want the mission chapters to already contain the resolution — they do not; that comes later, in the life after.

Entry, not exit

Most memoirs about growing up gay and Mormon are about leaving — dismantling an inherited faith, naming what it cost. This one is the opposite direction. Vitaly was not raised in the church. He joined it, at nineteen, with no family and nothing to lose, because it offered him one. For two years as a missionary in England, it delivered exactly that — brothers, structure, a place to belong — before the part of himself he could not fit into it caught up with him.

Setting

The book opens in western Ukraine, near the Carpathians and the Romanian border. It moves to England in 2002 and stays there through September 2004, the length of the mission.

From the manuscript

“As the Patriarch spoke, he said I would have a family. I had always wanted this, but I knew deep down that I was attracted to the same gender.” — Chapter 38, The Patriarchal Blessing. Pulled directly from the working draft, unedited.

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