Bad Mormon: A Memoir
By Heather Gay
☕︎☕︎☕︎
I have to be honest with you about something. I almost put this book in the Compost Bin. Not because it deserved to be there, but because I was worried about what you'd think of me, I said to myself, “compost bin for sure, so the internet knows I'm intellectually and morally superior to Bravo.” Middle Shelf felt safer. She's a housewife, the world says. Obviously vapid. Obviously not worth annotating.
But there was a little voice. Mine. Whispering, be honest.
Most Annotated Books is where this belongs, and I will stand behind that. I wrote in the margins. I scribbled connections. I highlighted sentences. I have talked to so many girlfriends about what Heather Gay writes that I've lost count.
I am an unabashed Real Housewives fan, and as a Salt Laker, how could I not consume what is literally living in my backyard and so far outside my everyday experience at the same time. I came to this memoir already in Heather's corner - her warmth and her willingness to be honest about her own contradictions made her impossible not to root for from the first season.
I was not raised LDS. I was raised evangelical, with a sprinkling of Baptist thrown in. I sat in the front pew as a kid, listening intently as my dad gave the sermon each week. I've since deconstructed, and wouldn't say I follow any specific religion anymore, but I can quote both testaments verse for verse. I know the dogma, the doctrine, the theology. I can talk about the original Greek and Hebrew, and when someone says "God is good!" I will automatically shout back "All the time! All the time!" before I've even registered I'm doing it.
Which is to say, I know what it costs to be raised inside a total worldview. I know what it feels like to love the people who gave it to you while quietly, privately, painfully stepping away from parts of it. Not to leave entirely. Not to burn it down. But to deconstruct. To hold the institution at arm's length and the people inside it close at the same time.
Heather writes about growing up in the LDS church, about the particular shape of a life built entirely around a faith community's expectations, the marriage, the motherhood, the performance of a specific kind of goodness, and what it costs to start pulling at those threads. She is so many of us. Every woman who learned how to be a good girl inside a system that defined goodness very narrowly, and who has spent her adult life quietly renegotiating the terms. Her grace and humor and refusal to be fully broken by any of it is, I'd argue, the most honest thing on the entire RHSLC franchise. Heather never hides from conflict. She is always the one trying to bring people back together in humility while also never, ever backing down from what needs to be said. I mean, “Receipts. Proof. Timeline. Screenshots. F---king everything!” I genuinely say that to myself while putting together casefiles at work. Absolutely iconic.
The book is funny and self-aware and bracingly honest about the ways women are asked to disappear into their roles, and what it looks and feels like to slowly, imperfectly refuse. Three cups - and I want to be clear that this rating reflects my expectations more than the book's actual quality. For a celebrity memoir it is genuinely good. For a book about deconstruction and identity and the specific experience of being raised female inside a total faith community, it is essential.
If you've ever had to figure out who you are outside of what you were raised to be, Heather Gay gets it.
