FALLING FROM DISGRACE

Dietz explores her religiously conservative upbringing in this debut memoir.

Despite living in California’s Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s, a region famed for its place in post-war progressive sociocultural and political movements, the author grew up in a deeply conservative environment. The book opens in 1976 as Dietz joined her family, devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, on a vacation to Utah making a pilgrimage to “Mormon Mecca” to visit the Salt Lake City Temple. Awed by the city’s broad streets as a wide-eyed 9-year-old, Dietz recalls her father’s sincere explanation that, as a prophet and leader of the nascent religious capital, Brigham Young “knew there would be cars before there were cars.” The author’s childhood commitment to her family’s faith is juxtaposed with her later ostracism as a young adult when she ran away from home. “Shamed and shunned” by her family and church as a sexually active teenager, she became disillusioned with the hypocrisy of a religion founded by a man whom she describes as “a cheating, polygamous, predatory hoarder of wives.” The author writes that she became cynical about the patriarchal nature of her tightknit Mormon community and “desensitized to [the] suffering” of her mother. While she frequently complained about being “stuck” in a one-sided, domineering marriage, her mother, per the book, was “willing to settle for helplessness” rather than push back against religious norms. With an MFA in creative nonfiction (Dietz was the editor of a literary magazine published by Pacific University), the author is a skilled writer whose engaging narrative effectively reveals how religious standards of devotion and piety can be abused by those in power. Her bracing condemnation of the church is balanced by a “softened…perspective” developed later in life that separates abusive power dynamics from nostalgic memories of the idealized faith of her childhood. In an effort to encourage other women who have been ostracized by religious families and communities, the book concludes with a list of “Questions for Discussion” for personal reflection or group discussion.

A poignant, absorbing story of overcoming religious trauma.