BOOK SYNOPSIS

What happens when the Church’s star student finally reads the fine print?

APOSTATE offers a rare look inside the mainstream Mormon Church and the private covenants ordinary members make in the reverence of its temples. For women of my generation, those promises included obedience to a husband and the consecration of everything we have, or may ever have, to the Church.

The memoir explores what happens when a woman keeps those promises with complete sincerity, only to discover how thoroughly she has surrendered authority over her body, marriage, family, and conscience.

For me, that surrender began at sixteen, in a small cinderblock office, sitting across from a middle-aged man we called Bishop during a private worthiness interview, a standard part of Mormon adolescence. I entered believing I had committed a sexual sin. I left having absorbed something much larger: that my body did not belong to me, male religious authority could determine my worth, and losing my virtue might be worse than losing my life.

I married in the temple, built my family around the faith, wore the underwear exactly as instructed, and became the kind of Mormon woman the community trusted. Along the way, a small Mormon mommy blog somehow grew into an online community of more than 100,000 people and a public life that seemed to prove the Mormon formula worked.

During California’s Proposition 8 measure, the Church’s position toward LGBTQ people prompted me to look more closely at the faith I had built my life around. I eventually uncovered the historical and doctrinal fine print. The collapse was swift, taking with it nearly every corner of my identity.

The material is dark. The telling is not.

Written in the voice of the girl and woman I was at each stage, APOSTATE allows the reader to experience the belief system from the inside. It moves with wry candor through the rebellious-Mormon-teenager-to-scrupulous-believer pipeline, the unspoken realities of female submission in Mormon marriage, the intimate rules governing sacred underwear, the eternal stakes attached to something as ordinary as coffee, and the discovery that leaving the Church can give you your life back while leaving you with no idea how to live it.

The final movement follows the long road back to joy, creativity, embodiment, pleasure, and internal authority through a year-long curiosity experiment that turns my life inside out. Without a church, a prescribed role, or a divine plan to follow, I begin experimenting with the radical possibility that desire might contain information and a life doesn’t have to be justified before it can be lived.

Although APOSTATE is deeply Mormon in its details, its central experience is universal: the midlife realization that the life you built was shaped by someone else.