The Book of Mormon Girl

Praise for Joanna
Brooks and
The Book of Mormon Girl

“This is an utterly necessary memoir.”

—Carolyn Forché, celebrated poet and human rights activist

“Joanna Brooks sheds the candid, genuinely informative light
I’ve been looking for on this ‘Mormon moment’ in American
life.”

—Krista Tippett, host of American Public Media’s
On Being

“This story is beautifully, universally true. It gives me hope.
Hope for our miscounted daughters, for our misunderstood grandmothers, and for the
achingly faithful hearts, like mine, still beating and bleeding for peace, tolerance,
and the seemingly lost cause of human respect. It gives me hope for our common lineage:
love.”

—Karen Maezen Miller, author of
Momma Zen: Walking
the Crooked Path of Motherhood
and
Hand Wash Cold:
Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life

“Joanna Brooks captures Mormonism in
revealing but tender ways that are sure to resonate with insiders and outsiders alike.
Mormonism may not yet have found its Chaim Potok, but it has its Joanna
Brooks.”

—R. B. Scott, author of
Mitt Romney: An Inside
Look at the Man and His Politics

“Joanna Brooks defies Mormon stereotypes.”

—Politico.com

“Laugh-out-loud funny and break-your-heart poignant,
The Book of Mormon Girl
delivers an ironic triumph: a little
girl’s religion invests her with enough history, bravery, and devotion that the
woman she becomes can only stand up to her people and say, ‘No! We are better than
that!’ A delicious and hopeful journey.”

—Carol Lynn Pearson, author of
Mother Wove the
Morning
and
No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons
Around Our Gay Loved Ones

“Joanna Brooks draws upon a rich spiritual legacy in this
compelling memoir of being found and lost and found again. What she describes as a
‘fierce and hungry faith’ leaps off the page with passion, galvanizing
readers who strive for justice and want to live their religion on their own terms. She
is a contemporary Mormon pioneer.”

—Jana Riess, author of
Flunking Sainthood
and
Mormonism for Dummies

“Joanna Brooks’s narrative is, by
turns, disarming, funny, wrenching, and inspiring. Steeped in the quaint, nourishing
ways of a Southern California Mormon home, she was a ‘root beer among the
Cokes’ of her non-Mormon schoolmates: sparkling, different, no caffeine. She grew
up and grew conflicted, finding herself in a decade-long exile from her conservative
people. Badly wanting her daughters to know what her grandmothers knew, to lay claim to
the curious beauty and power of her religious heritage, Brooks at last declares herself
‘not an enemy’: ‘I will not be disappeared from the faith of my
ancestors.’ She returns as a Coke among Mormon root beers: still different, still
sparkling. Her version of the Mormon story is unorthodox, uncommon, and lyrical. This is
a quietly fierce, authentic, and faithful voice, one that insists her religious
tradition is young, and the next chapter yet to be written.”

—Philip Barlow, Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture,
Utah State University

for ella and rosa

1
plan of salvation

2
sparkling difference

3
signs of the times

4
marie osmond’s guide to beauty, health & style

5
mormons vs. born-agains—dance-off, rose bowl, 1985

6
sister williams’s tampons

7
object lessons

8
files

9
sealed portion

10
pioneer day

11
protect marriage

12
gathering the tribes

13
the book of mormon girl

acknowledgments

reading group guide

plan of salvation

O
n Monday nights, my father and mother gathered their four children around the kitchen table in our tract house on the edge of the orange groves and taught us how the universe worked.

Sometimes they used a stack of cotton work gloves to demonstrate the thin illusoriness of this life. “Your spirit is like this hand,” my father would say, wiggling his fingers. “Your spirit has always existed. When you were born, your spirit went into your body and a veil of forgetfulness was drawn across your mind.” He slipped his hand into the glove. “When you die your spirit will leave your body and join the spirits of your ancestors on the other side of the veil,” he said, withdrawing his hand from the glove, and leaving it an inert heap on the Formica tabletop. Death was made as small and
familiar to me as changing clothes, and this life a moment of forgetfulness on a long, long thread of being.

Sometimes too my parents taught us about the farm-boy prophet Joseph Smith, who long ago in upstate New York had gone into a grove of trees, gotten down on his knees, and put his questions directly to God, who, with His son Jesus, appeared directly to Joseph Smith and then sent angels to reveal new books of scripture and new ways of being. Every night when I knelt on the little crocheted orange prayer rug at the side of my bed, I prayed to a God that heard and answered. Sometimes too I had dreams and God spoke kindly to me in my dreams, and I woke with wet eyes, so disappointed to be back on the forgetful side of the veil that separated this world from the next.

When we children were asleep, my auburn-haired mother stayed up late, late, late, pulling the names of our ancestors out of thickets of old records, to reorder them all for eternity’s sake in a baby-blue Book of Remembrance with the outlines of Mormon temple spires embossed on the cover in gold. Sometimes, in the morning, standing in the kitchen, she would tell us how dark forces had surrounded her late at night to encumber her work, but our ancestors stepped through time, straight through the walls of our tract house in the orange groves, identifying themselves by name and declaring that they would protect her.

I grew up in kitchens where bushels of backyard-grown green beans were canned and put up for the winter, habits of
pioneer preparedness, steam on the kitchen windows against the perfect California sunshine outside. On the refrigerator hung a calendar from the local Mormon mortuary, each month a picture of a different Mormon temple around the globe: in Arizona, London, Switzerland, or Los Angeles. I grew up riding in fleets of blue-paneled family vans, bench seats loaded with children, all going to church in our play-clothes on a Wednesday afternoon, everything perfectly understood among us, all the lyrics memorized, nothing to be explained.

Early on Sunday mornings, the fourteen-year-old boys from church knocked on our front door to gather in the tithes and offerings. Later, my parents, brother, sisters, and I sat together in wooden pews, sang pioneer hymns, and took a white-bread-and-tap-water sacrament passed on plastic trays. On Sunday afternoons, my father, who worked all week as an engineer but gave his weekends to service as the bishop of our congregation, stayed behind to hear all the confessions and woes of the people: all their secrets he tucked away in the breast pocket of his polyester Sunday suit. And most Sunday evenings, seventy-something-year-old Sister Pierce would appear on our doorstep, a homemade strawberry pie in her hands, an offering to my father, the bishop, who one midnight in a cold hospital room had anointed her head with consecrated olive oil and given her a healing blessing.

This is how I came into this world, into this world of believing: an ancient spirit striving to remember the shape
of eternity at the kitchen table, in a house where ancestors knew our names and stepped through the walls, my dreams filled with light, my head consecrated with oil, every Sunday morning white bread and tap water for sacrament, every Sunday evening the taste of a ripe glazed strawberry saying “grateful” on my tongue.

•   •   •

When I turned seven years old, my father asked me if I could read the whole Book of Mormon before I was to be baptized at age eight. And I said I could. So every night my father settled in beside me in my little twin bed on the second story of the tract home at the edge of the orange groves, and we held the Book of Mormon on our laps.

Together, we read of a small family of Israelites, Lehi and Sariah, their children Laman, Lemuel, Nephi, and Sam, warned by God to leave the land of their ancestors and travel far across the oceans to the Americas, where they would become (as we believed) the ancestors of the American Indians.

We read of a powerful dream given by God to Lehi. Lehi dreamed that he traveled for hours in dark mists of uncertainty, begging for mercy from God, until he reached a beautiful field, with a river and a tree of life bearing delicious fruit. A narrow path with an iron handrail led to the tree of life, past great and spacious buildings of people in fancy clothes who mocked the searching humility of Lehi, his family, and
the numberless masses of people who pressed forward along the path, hungry for the delicious fruit. How many strayed from the path and were lost in the mists, or joined the proud crowds in the great and spacious building! How few finally held to the iron handrail and made it to the tree of life!

And as I felt the warmth of my father in bed beside me, I also felt the terrible danger of the world around us, peril rushing in currents beneath us, threatening to separate us one from another, and the threat of that separation was to my mind unbearable. My father understood the terrible danger too, and he hungered for some way to get me safely through the mists crowding in around us. Mormonism was the name of the iron handrail that would lead us through these mists to that beautiful tree, the end of all our hungers.