The Book of Mormon Girl, by Joanna Brooks

When people who don’t know a lot about American Christianity hear that I am Mennonite, they sometimes ask if it’s the same as being Mormon. No, I say, and add a stock reply: other than starting with the same letter of the alphabet and being inscrutable to outsiders, the groups are quite different.

After reading Joanna Brooks’s memoir The Book of Mormon Girl, I will no longer answer with such alacrity. It is true that few threads connect Joseph Smith with Menno Simons or the Book of Mormon with Martyrs Mirror. But any readers of Brooks’s book who grew up in the snug orb of a conservative ethnoreligious community will come away with a sense of having traveled this way before. The comfort of churchly ritual that orders the week and of theological certitude that orders the universe, the once-persecuted minority status, the sense of tribal belonging, the gendered patterns of church and home, the ability to pick out each other in a crowd, and—oh my—the potlucks: these are the thickly textured traits of such communities that will make Brooks’s memoir feel familiar to a wide swath of readers.

Just as resonant is Brooks’s journey out of religious fundamentalism and into a young adulthood full of doubts about a faith that suddenly seems prejudiced, myopic and punitive. Switch out a few doctrinal details, and you have a familiar modern account of the religious journey. That is not to say that Brooks’s autobiography is generic or predictable. Her writing is witty, poetic, at times melodramatic—and always utterly Mormon and utterly her own.