The book I finished reading this weekend

The older I get, the more fascinated I become with other people's stories, the shape of their lives and their choices and how they feel about them.

This is why I picked up The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir at the library.

Elna Baker is a Mormon who broke with the family tradition of going to BYU and went to NYU instead. She studied drama and became a writer and stand-up comedian.

While the book flashes back to her Mormon childhood, it mostly focuses on her 20s and her quest to find love and meaning and self-acceptance in NYC.

It is often hilarious and outrageous, but it's equal parts heartfelt and sincere. Elna has not run away to NYC to escape from a stifling religious upbringing. Rather she is someone who believes she can have it ALL. This is the story of how she embraced the purity and discipline of her Mormonism while living the single life in a city her mother has called a modern day Babylon. Her story is not pretty or sentimental or a modern-day morality tale. It's more complicated than that.

Elna is too smart and too well traveled to tell a simple fish-out-of-water tale. She is not interested in mocking her faith, though she isn't above recognizing how absurd it appears in others' eyes. She asks God and herself hard questions, and she doesn't settle for easy answers. She is more than a little immature, a fact she acknowledges more than once in the narrative.

She is sincere. She is socially awkward. She is confused. She is creative. She is vain. She is impulsive. She is goofy. She has a lot of baggage. She is intelligent. She is forever ambivalent. And she is VERY FUNNY. (Her stories about working at FAO Schwartz as a toy demonstrator reminded me of David Sedaris.)

Even though I'm not a Mormon and I'm far removed from the age and place Elna currently occupies, her story reminded me of my own struggles to make sense of religion and figure out how to be myself, be a person of faith, be married, and be a mom. I also related (a bit too well) to her struggles with self-image and her desire to be pretty. I admired her honesty, even if I sometimes wanted to shake her.

As a writer, I found her style engaging. Her bubbly personality and energy come through on every page. She's a skilled storyteller, balancing the comic and the serious, and the book's storyline was more suspenseful than I expected.

Consider adding The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir  to the collection of books by your bed. It's not often you get to laugh and think at the same time. 

Comments

[Neil]

Sounds great. Are you on Good Reads, which is a social network thingy for books and people who like them?

[V-Grrrl]

I'm not on Good Reads. I'll check it out. I've never done anything social with books--not even a book club, online or in IRL.

[RD]

I'll have to check this one out. I recently read "Mennonite in a Little Black Dress", also a memoir with a similar theme, written by an English professor who finds herself returning to her family and her spiritual roots after her life takes some unexpected catastrophic turns. Very funny in places and well written--as one would hope to expect of an college English professor :-). You might enjoy that one too.

[Chris]

I'm anxious to check out this one. :-) Thank you, V. [Getting ready to return to Utah with Redmondo. Chris and boys hit the road this morning...]

[Toronto Home Staging]

Try reading the Kite Runner, its an amazing real life based edition of a man who grew up in the war zones of Afghanistan and went out in the not so welcoming world of America.

[San Diego Momma]

I love book recommendations. I'm always on the lookout for something for my book club. Also loved the Kite Runner like Toronto suggested, but assume you read it already?

And because one good turn deserves another...our next book club book is:
Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman (who is the sister of a good friend).

It looks excellent.

[V-Grrrl]

I haven't read the Kite Runner, though it's on my shelf because my husband read it. I think I was a bit afraid to enter its world. Sometimes books take me to places I'm not ready to face. It can be a good thing--but other times it's just too much for me. I internalize a lot of the emotion and drama of a book.