Matthew Dalton's Reviews > Bad Mormon: A Memoir

Disclaimer, I actually didn’t finish, I only made it to page 154 of 281. My Elvira memoir came in the mail so I’ll be retiring this book to the trunk of my car to pull out and use as kindling for my campfires.

Bad. Really bad. Heather doesn’t explore nuances of her life in depth at all. I read someone else’s review saying it was like taking a trip through someone’s life without ever stopping to look around and I literally couldn’t agree more but with probably a more overall negative attitude towards this. The only part of the book I found endearing was one paragraph about her meeting a missionary in Norway as a Housewife™️ and not saying much to him but imagining all the things she would say to him that she didn’t say to him for some reason.

I feel bad writing my overwhelmingly negative opinions about this because Heather is rad on television. Is she my least favorite of the cast that has been one of the main characters for all three seasons?…maybe. But if I ever saw her walking the same sidewalk I was walking, you bet I’d be shouting MOTHER and asking for a self-timed, street lamp propped up phone photo. But really, only read this if you want to…not enjoy your leisure reading?

Now I’m going to make a massive assumption here. And if I get a letter in the mail from Bravo/Peacock warning if I ever stepped into Salt Lake/Park City territory, expect a neon red dot on my forehead, I get it. But this book almost feels like an expedited plea for Heather’s excommunication.

Let me explain, so she spends an ungodly amount of time describing the rituals of the LDS church when accessing the temple for the first time. And because I drank wine while reading this, this one afternoon, I stumbled off my overlook deck and asked my own ex-Mormon father about something specific that she did in these rituals. He buttoned up faster than a kid on a snow day and said to me, “We’re really not supposed to talk about those things.” So she’s over here, typing out legendary taboos step by step, spending more time on that than she did about literally anything else. Like she could’ve at least described what the French Riviera was like using the five senses but no. I had also just watched the episode of Ultimate Girl’s Trip (and in that, unrelatedly, Heather makes a joke about getting a sober woman drunk, which put a very acrid taste in my mouth) where Heather says she actually hasn’t gotten very far in the process of her legal denouncement of her status in the church. This is a process I’m madly unfamiliar with, but it sounds like she had been saying she was much further along than she actually was. In my mind, reading the detailed process of these rituals for which she provided no actual commentary or elucidated a real purpose for including it in the book other than to paint a picture that Mormons have observably silly practices that are massively guarded, and then seeing she hasn’t really done much to leave the church other than calling herself a Bad Mormon™️, I’m over here with a cork board, yarn, thumbtacks, and streakily printed out photos (printer’s running out of ink) concluding that if she’s revealing all these LDS secrets, she must be begging for the church to kick her out so she doesn’t have to feel like SHE initiated her own excommunication!

My observation from the 154 pages I read is that Heather deeply loves her family and her (former) faith! The divorce from her husband seemed to launch her out of what the LDS church (that she loves dearly) expects out of members, so she feels unworthy and thinks this might be what she has to do now. For the love of the church, she must self-abnegate because the church somehow deserves better.

I don’t know, man, maybe she just was like “teehee I have a blank Google docs that needs to get to 18,000 words, what should I say?” Maybe she truly just had no agenda and was feeling incendiary for some reason. Love your hair, Heather, can’t wait to have this book be talked about next season.

Final thoughts: boooooooo.