More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You’ll soon find that this choice is only one of the many ways that I am a Bad Mormon.
I didn’t even know that we were religious. I just thought that we were better than everyone else.
I didn’t yet know that I was already steeped in the lifeblood of devout religion: denial, denial, denial.
I would have to do better. I would try to be softer.
She was smart enough and mom enough to teach me, to stack the deck in my favor. To build the skill set I would need to survive. She was giving me a fighting chance.
Matt had been in my classes since kindergarten and was the foil by which I gauged all my scholarly pursuits. We tested in the same percentile, we checked out the same books at the library, we raced each other to finish our math worksheets, and pretended it wasn’t a big deal if we didn’t win a poster award at the book fair.
Like me and chris morris
I wanted him to pull me aside and say, “I’d rather you be funny and brave and occasionally look obnoxious than for you to think you have to be small and quiet and nice in order to be good.”
I knew it was a hot-dog-eat-hot-dog world out there in the battle of the sexes, and I planned on succeeding with the boys using a few of the unspoken Young Women Values.
It was Housewife Tradecraft 101, an omen of my future.
Regina was no slouch, and she wasn’t about to cast her pearls before any swine. Mark was kicked to the curb, and our friendship took off to the races. I knew I could count on her to keep me in line. She was an anchor in a storm that was growing by the day.
We were either exposing each other or covering for each other. Either way, the concept of secrecy, of harboring double lives, bred like bacteria in a Petri dish.
When you’re surrounded by the truly sweet, even a raspberry can seem sour. I was standing out for all the wrong reasons. I was too big, too loud, and too much.
Our days were spent gearing up for lunch, racing through lunch, and then recovering from lunch. It was my dream job.
Me and Katelyn at Oxford
because I’d done it all while working full-time as a tanning engineer,
Okay lmao relax
It was not the type of environment where you were free to be a good-time girl and regret it in the morning. You flashed your tits and someone told? You were going home in a body bag of shame and debt.
After I rang him up, I confessed. “Calling my sales pitch ‘not a sales pitch’ is my actual sales pitch.”
All of his calls went unanswered and unreturned. There would be no harvesting of this Heather.
I had never had anyone in my life encourage me to do anything past this point. No mention of an advanced degree. No mention of an actual career. No mention of travel, or adventure, or a gap year. The map only led to marriage, so I didn’t know where to go next.
I never opened my door for the Jehovah’s Witnesses that dutifully dropped by with pamphlets and I didn’t want to have that same experience stateside and be rejected by my very own.
The South of France. Full-body chills.
I still wholeheartedly believed in Santa Claus—his lore was nothing compared with the leap of logic needed to justify Joseph Smith’s first vision—but
The beliefs aren’t reinforced by strangers, they’re reinforced by the people who love you most.
But an equal part of it was about the people we were doing the work with. Women.
God cares how you layer. God wants the bra over the shirt over the boobs. We were truly engaged in the work of the Lord.
Only in retrospect do I realize that her unflinching belief in the impossible was a sort of foil for my own recognition.
“You really shouldn’t marry anyone without seeing how they act in all four seasons.
We knelt across an altar, he held my hand in the Patriarchal Grip, and when the temple officiant asked if I was willing to submit to my husband for time and all eternity, I bowed my head and said, “Yes.”
Ew
“We had each other, then we had you, and then we had everything.”
“Just sit down, Sister Gay. Sit down. You don’t have to do the most. You don’t have to be the most. Just sit down and be still.”
And so I made it a white party, modeled after Kyle Richards herself. White everything.
Cringe
The never-say-no girl had found her voice. And he responded by announcing his departure. “Do the baptism when you want. I’ll move out next week.”
If I could so easily die inside and just do the work, why then was it so impossible for Billy?
“He took the boat out with his friends and a bunch of single girls,” my friend reported. “They called to ask me if he was still married to you.”
I made my husband disappear. “Heather, you’re completely helpless.” “You know Heather, you’re what the French call les incompétentes.” “There are fifteen bridesmaids in spaghetti straps, and you’re the only one who has to wear a bolero jacket.” “Sit down, Sister Gay.” “Do the baptism when you want. I’ll move out next week.” Silence. I made my husband disappear. I MADE MY HUSBAND DISAPPEAR!
Summer should be fun!
CRINGE
It’s ok to walk away from beliefs that no longer serve you. It takes a long time to retrain your brain, but if we can do it, you can do it. And we will help you.”
Elan Gale,
Oop
For almost eight weeks, my face was paralyzed on one side. May my Costco card serve as evidence.
In order to reach the whistle and save myself, I had to drop the frozen, lifeless hand. I had been floating aimlessly and alone, numb to all around me. My lips an icy blue, my skin a ghostly white, I held on to life if only for the reason that my hand was frozen tight in the Patriarchal Grip. Dewy tears clung to my lashes like little particles of ice, weighing down my eyes and closing them to all in my peripheral sight.
Long before she became Lisa Barlow, anyone within our insular radius had heard tale of Lisa Lee.
When I heard that Meredith had fucked half of New York, I wasn’t surprised, she doesn’t do anything half-assed, unless it’s her pants size. There are still a few tricks I can learn from this garbage whore.
She was down for anything and everything and flipped through expert poses the way I flipped through Instagram filters. In a town full of beauties and beasts, there is only one wild rose. And she was blooming. We were wrapping up scene number one and getting ready for outfit number two when Whitney went straight for B number three. Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls. Wearing this… wearing only this. She reached down and slowly removed her pirate-patch panties. Ahoy, matey! My prayer came out instinctively, fervently, and surprisingly in Spanish. Oh, espíritu de Santiago!
...more
YOU EXPLOITED MY VAGINA IN YOUR BOOK
I photographed her from belly button to backside without breaking a sweat. As I was leaving later that night, I spotted the tiny black panties on the patio—once flung, now forgotten. I walked over, picked them up, and slipped them into my pocket as smoothly as a sleeve of French Imovane. You never know when an eye-patch might come in handy.
Anyone who can relate to the “fake it till you make it” motto would absolutely relate to Lisa Barlow; her performative reality made mine look like a sock-puppet show. She enters a room and… begin scene. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiii.”
the naked wasted.
STOP.
Living out loud was uncharted waters.
Nothing gold can stay.
Lisa was not thrilled. She called to let me know. We discussed how Whitney might not be a good fit for the type of show she was curating. Trashy? Very TLC.
Mary always smelled fabulous and always the same. She said it was a world-class perfume painstakingly developed by hand and by nose in the tiny parfumerie village of Grasse in the South of France. To me it smelled a lot like Dolce & Gabbana.
Mary was an uninhibited force to be reckoned with, a truly original person with an original perspective on life and with an uncanny ability to read all of us like scripture.
