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The Book of Mormon Girl
Joanna Brooks 2012, 209 pages Nonfiction
The Book of Mormon Girl by Joanna Brooks is a thoughtful memoir about Brooks’s growing up in an orthodox Mormon home and later becoming a feminist, a gay rights advocate, and an interfaith parent married to “a man whose religious practice entails a combination of Judaism, Buddhism, and ESPN.” It’s also the story of Brooks assimilating these parts of herself. She writes: “Mormonism is my first language, my mother tongue, my family, my people, my home; it is my heart . . . ” But it also breaks her heart.
At Brigham Young University, she discovers liberal Mormonism around the time church leaders name “feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians enemies.” Brooks returns her diploma in protest. After grad school and marriage, she’s miserable anywhere near a Mormon church, but wants to share her heritage with her daughters. She realizes, “This is a church of tenderness and arrogance, of sparkling differences and human failings. There is no unmixing of the two.” Brooks’s writing is heartfelt and warm, and the narrative has a raw quality that enhances the book’s authenticity. For fans of Rhoda Janzen or Terry Tempest Williams, or readers curious about Mormon beliefs.
