Brooks - The book of mormon girl: a memoir of an american faith

ASHLEY DUCHENE

Joanna Brooks is a national voice on Mormon life and politics, an award-winning scholar of religion and American culture, and the author or editor of five books. She has been featured on American Public Medias On Being, NPRs All Things Considered, NPRs Talk of the Nation, Interfaith Voices, Radio West, and BBCs Americana, and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the CNN Belief Blog, and the Huffington Post. She is a columnist for the online magazine ReligionDispatches and offers answers to seekers of all stripes at her own website, Askmormongirl.com. Follow @askmormongirl on Twitter or visit her at joannabrooks.org.

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Praise for Joanna Brooks and The Book of Mormon Girl

This is an utterly necessary memoir.

Carolyn Forch, celebrated poet and human rights activist

Joanna Brooks sheds the candid, genuinely informative light Ive been looking for on this Mormon moment in American life.

Krista Tippett, host of American Public Medias 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 girls 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 Brookss 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

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Copyright 2012 by Joanna Brooks

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thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

This Free Press trade paperback edition August 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4516-9968-5
ISBN 978-1-4516-9969-2 (eBook)

for ella and rosa

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 eternitys 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.