Bad Mormon

Heather Gay is the author and protagonist of Bad Mormon. The memoir traces her evolution from an enthusiastic and devout Mormon with developing questions about and tension with her faith to a self-defined ex-Mormon living on her own terms. Gay suggests that this religious journey prepared her for the pressures of her life as a reality television star. In the prologue to Bad Mormon, Gay explicitly claims that she was “indoctrinated” into the Mormon Church (xii). Although the word indoctrinated holds a negative connotation, Gay emphasizes that she spent her early years truly believing in the church’s teachings. She writes that, as a child, she “believed in [her] family and [their] religion like [she] believed in America”  and that, she often “couldn’t tell the difference between the two” (9). When her friends and classmates talked about their religions, Gay insisted that Mormonism was “a way of life” and that their way of life “[was] so much better” than her friends could imagine (8). Among her church friends, Gay was proud of her elite status as a Born in the Covenant Mormon, “a daughter of the Most High God sealed for time and all eternity to devout, temple-married parents,” rather than adult converts (7).