I served a two-year Mormon mission in South Africa between 2018 and 2020. Though it was pretty out of character before the mission, I didn't miss a single day of writing in my journal: three faux alligator skin volumes, filled front to back, one for every eight months I was gone.

Once my mission ended and I arrived back in the States, I realized my experiences would make an interesting, and hopefully helpful, story.

But I started by telling it wrong.

In September 2022, I posted Chapter One of what was then a fairly salacious missionary romance on Reddit. It was a partially fictional retelling, centered around my journals. My focus at the time was primarily on the physical, and that's what resonated—with readers and me. At least initially. As interest grew, so did the questions. People wanted to know about the world around the romance: the day-to-day of missionary life, the companions, the rituals, the decisions that had led me and others to where we ended up.

In others words, they wanted the whole story.

By 2025, enough time had passed that I was finally ready to tell it the way it needed to be told. I went back to the beginning, opened the journals again, and reconstructed something more detailed and more true to myself, and to the people I'd known.

Missionary is the result. A novel in parts, drawn from 733 days of writing, beginning at the MTC in Provo and ending in the mission field in Johannesburg. It's a story about a young man who learns that who he is has no place in the faith he was raised to serve.

On the pen name

I write as Dylan Gray because the life I live now is entirely separate from the life I'm writing about. That boy feels both like a hero and a stranger, someone I knew and loved but who doesn't exist in the same way anymore.

The pen name protects that separation, and it honors him. He tried so hard to be who the Church needed him to be. Fortunately, and courageously, he failed to do so. This is his book, and dedicated to all those who survived a similar journey.

— Dylan