Brandon Mull felt broken.
The New York Times bestselling author of the “Fablehaven” series and member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints felt his marriage “slipping away” — and thought that the pain would be eternal.
“I wanted to some day be part of a heavenly kingdom with my wife and my kids. I wanted that to come true. I wanted that to happen. It was kind of the most important thing to me. It was what I had put first in my heart and in my efforts,” Mull told the audience Thursday at the 2025 FAIR Conference at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah.
The author was candid about his divorce in his remarks at the conference hosted by FAIR, an organization that seeks to share faith-informed responses to questions regarding the Church of Jesus Christ.
“I felt like if this eternal marriage could be this source of eternal joy, then to lose it was an eternal wound. It would never heal.”
Mull was angry with God and wished he had showed him his weaknesses before it was too late. He then realized being angry with God wasn’t the answer.
“I found that with all the anger there was no benefit to getting angry at the healer,” he said.
Brandon Mull: Doubling down on God
Mull was faithful during his marriage, but told the audience that he started it off on the wrong foot — broken hearted because he had been in love with two women at the same time.
“Because I drug out the situation for another year, I ended up married and with a broken heart on my wedding day, feeling like I was letting somebody down while I married somebody else,” he said.
Over time, he thought his marriage was improving. His wife “was supportive and great,” and the couple had four children together.
But one day, his wife told him things weren’t working for her anymore.
With divorce looming, Mull started going to the temple, wanting to know how to save his marriage. There, God showed Mull his shortcomings in his marriage, including “things in my character I could improve,” he said.
Mull thought if he could become “good enough,” he could save his marriage.
But that wasn’t the case.
“No matter how hard I tried, no matter what I’d learned and as I really was growing as a person, I was not able to save the situation,” he said.
He turned to his mother and mother-in-law for counsel. Their advice was to “double down on God.”
Overcoming heartbreak with God
One night seven years ago, Mull decided to pray. He told God he would fast and go to the temple the next day, but he needed God to show up for him.
He woke up with the clear thought “to just love” his wife. God didn’t want him to continue trying to convince her that she was making the wrong choice or show her what he could become.
Though God didn’t show up in the way Mull had hoped, he felt seen and like the weight had been lifted with that answer.
Mull still went to the temple that day. He had a sacred experience where he felt God take away his pain completely. And that pain never returned, not even an hour, day, week or year later.
“I realized that the way to overcome the heartbreak and disappointments of this life was to actually come to Christ, was to push toward him until he responded, and that was it,” he said.
Mull considers that his “born again” experience because “I was a different person for the rest of my life,” he said.
“This personal understanding that what makes the hardships of this life OK is that eventually, when he chooses, when the time is right, he can just fix it, and when I say he can fix it, he recreates you as if the harm never happened. There’s no scars. There’s just everything you learned from the experience and the state of being healed from it,” he said.
Mull told Thursday’s audience that everyone should seek out that understanding.
“That is something that I would encourage anyone on this planet to seek with all their hearts because there’s no better feeling, and you can never get enough of that which does not satisfy. But coming to Christ successfully satisfies in the way you hoped everything else would and it never did,” he said.
Brandon Mull: Lessons from his divorce
After his divorce, Mull fell in love again and remarried five years ago. He and his current wife, Erlyn, share 11 children between them.
“I could not have done this marriage had I not had like a level-up experience with Christ because it was through the changes that happened there that even capacitated me to give this a shot,” he said.
Through his divorce, Mull learned he needed to put God first.
“Going all in on my family was a good thing as long as it wasn’t above God,” he said. “But I had to do a little bit of reordering after that because putting God first elevates everything else. If you love your family, the thing to do is to put God first, and you will do a better job loving your family.”
Mull also learned that coming to Jesus Christ is the remedy for life’s disappointments.
“It’s the only thing I know about that saves us from the disappointments of this life,” he said.
Mull believes Jesus Christ experienced the disappointments and heartbreaks of all mankind and because he overcame that, we can too, he said.
“He lived that. He experienced it all, and when he resurrected, he came back from that whole and healed, and what that means is he knows the way back for you, whole and healed from your specific circumstances.”