Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond

by Deborah Laake

A Mormon woman chronicles her life as a member of America's fastest-growing Christian denomination, recalling her marriage at age nineteen, the divorce that left her a pariah in the church, and the various rituals of her religion

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion, Memoir, Biography, Mormonism, Cults, Autobiography

384 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update I just had to share this. She is on the bed with her fiance, they are kissing and she says they are 'bumping pubic bones' (what the rest of us call dry humping or similar) when she has her first orgasm, which sets him off. So she doesn't know (at 19) what it is but is afraid it has affected her purity so they go to a Mormon gynaecologist together to find out what it was... It is obviously true, you wouldn't even think of something like this to make it up1
__________

What does this sound like to you?

(Amazon review) "Yes, the Mormon church used to require its patrons to take blood oaths by demonstrating their throats being slit, their hearts being cut out, and their bowels being spilled from their guts. I have to admit I was one of those devout Mormons who very quickly denied it if anyone revealed anything about the church."

And they have a secret handshake and wear ceremonial aprons. It sounds like the Freemasons, right? But it's the Mormons. And Joseph Smith was a Mason, his father before him possibly was, his brothers certainly were. So I read up on it and also ordered this book. It should be interesting.

[Kelly (and the Book Boar) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up because it was recommended to me after finishing Under the Banner of Heaven I was alllllllll about finding out more when it comes to “Secret Ceremonies” of the Mormon church. But then I listened to it and . . . .



While it does share some behind the scenes moments from a marriage in the temple, for the most part it reads like something from the 1950s by an author who would have been classified as “prone to hysteria” as she frequents the local psych ward for being an oversexed, “boy crazy,” chronic masturbator. Bizarre.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling story that shows the danger of letting an organization control your thoughts and self-esteem. This is an extreme case, but tales of psychological abuse similar to this are all too common in the Mormon Church. Deborah Laake's memoir is vivid in detail, intelligent, and ultimately very moving. Deborah committed suicide years after this was published, but her book remains a warning to those of us left behind.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another memoir by a woman who desperately needed mental health support but, guided by fundamentalist church leaders (all men) was told to cleave tighter to her church and submit to and obey her husband. "If only you were a better wife you wouldn't be so unhappy!" Add to this the complication (in my mind, a complication) that the fundamentalist church leaders were from the Mormon church and it was definitely very difficult for her. So difficult to separate the notion of a loving God from the nonsense that the church was pushing on her. The dilemma that cuts to the quick - could she leave the church but not leave God? Most of the time she felt like the answer was "no".

The "Secret Ceremonies" she describes are the rituals from the Mormon church that a woman must participate in before she is able to be married. "Kooky" doesn't begin to describe them. Now, with billions of Mormon's all over the world, I realize that one man's kooky is another man's sacred, but still... She had to mime slitting her own throat should she divulge any of the secrets outside of the temple. And that's just the beginning.

She was finally able to get the help she needed once she well and truly left the church. And, once she left the church she was shunned by former friends. I mean, they literally turned their back to her when she walked by.

Sounds like a cult to me. And I'm sure it felt like one to her once she left.

And, when you're finished reading the book, read this: http://www.salon.com/2000/10/27/laake/

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating. convinced me that mormonism is a cult.

[Hava · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was working at the library and saw this book as I checked it out to a patron. Interested, I put it on hold for myself. I picked it up early this morning to read because I couldn't sleep, and surprisingly, have already finished it.

It's surprising because truly, this book didn't hold my interest like I thought it would. I was born and raised a very devout Mormon, and only left the Church a couple of years ago after I starting questioning doctrine that I had held as absolute truth all of my life.

And so in a lot of ways, my teenage and college years were frighteningly similar to Laake's. There is a mentality at BYU that cannot be found elsewhere - that a 21-year-old woman is a spinster, or that getting engaged is almost something you do for entertainment on the weekends. And then once you're engaged, you spend your time picking out wedding invitations and your wedding dress, and you ignore all of the problems and gaping holes in your relationship that are screaming, "Don't do this! You'll regret it!" Instead, the conditioning that you've received since birth (your goal in life is to get married in the temple) keeps you believing that all you need to focus on is getting to the altar. Everything else will work itself out.

So yes, in a lot of ways, our story is similar, and so that made for interesting reading. However, Laake's writing style was difficult for me to get used to. The way she structured her sentences threw me for a loop time after time. I would get to the end of sentence and have to start over again so I could try to understand what she was saying. Usually I understood the sentence the second or third time through, but I felt like I was struggling way too much to read what should have been a simple autobiography.

Also, Laake goes into detail of what happens in the endowment session in the LDS temple, and perhaps that part was supposed to be scintillating, but because I've gone through the endowment session, it was simply boring instead. If you're non-Mormon and you're wanting to know what happens inside of the temple, here you go. Read this book (although bear in mind that they changed the ceremony in 1990, something the author talks about in the Epilogue). But even back when I was a devout Mormon, I thought the endowment ceremony was boring, and so it was nothing but sheer willpower that helped me make it through the sessions awake. Turns out, it's no more exciting to read about than it was to live through. ;-) So that portion of the book didn't do much for me.

I guess that's why, on the whole, this book left me disappointed. When I saw the title, I thought perhaps Laake had done something exciting or different in her "secret ceremony" in the temple. Was there some strange branch of Mormons that started sacrificing goats or something? Nope, there wasn't. The Mormon ceremony that she suffered through was the same one that I did. Nothing to get up in arms about (more like snore through instead).

So I leave the book feeling so-so about it. It took guts to write her story, I'll give her that. But the book suffered from a real lack of editorial talent, and the title of the book suggested something more exciting than what really transpired.

[Stacie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have this book in hard cover. I have read this book at least 3 times myself. I first found it in paperback in my early 20s. The book cover and the title is likened to a fiction book. This book is non fiction and the complete title is:
"Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond"

In my early 20s, I passed the book to a friend at work and I never saw that copy again. That copy was passed around to just about everyone where I worked.

I am not good a writing reviews but you can find many if you search on amazon. There are many reviews under the isbn # given and more if you do a search for the title (under hardback or author).

The book deals with the ceremonies in the Morman church, struggles in the church and lifestyle of morman women. All from the point of view of a woman who was born into a Morman family. The sheltered life, etc.

This book is out of print, I purchased 2 hard copies from ebay several years ago (one copy went to my father).

[Ellyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you want to be convinced that Mormonism is a cult, then this is your book! It's one woman's story of her experiences in the Mormon church, beginning with her marriage as a student at Brigham Young University. It comes across as sensational and tell-all and doesn't attempt to be balanced. I can't deny that it was interesting... but it's defintely one woman's story with no attempt at a greater sense of cultural or historical perspective.

[Nancy Loe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horrifying and illuminating.

[Althea Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This non-fiction autobiography purports to be an expose of the Mormon religion, but is really just an expose of one woman's unhappy life.

I haven't learned anything I didn't know about Mormonism from this book, but I have learned more details than I really ever needed to know about a stranger's sex life!

The book isn't very well written, either, but it has the same weird appeal as that of a daytime talk show, where you can't really figure out WHY the guests want to reveal these sordid and intimate details of their lives to the general public.

And Laake does pretty much admit that the messes she gets herself into are her own fault... she's just pretty spineless. For example, she marries a guy she doesn't love - but it wasn't an arranged marriage or anything - the guy pursued her, she didn't have the guts to break up with him or tell him no, and she *assumes* that her family would want her to marry him. Of course, the marriage doesn't go well. But it wasn't her church that got her into the mess. After the divorce (which her family supports her through), yes, church elders treat her pretty badly. But you know what? No one's forcing her to go to counseling with male elders who are weirdly obsessed with the details of her sex life. No one's even forcing her to be a Mormon!

In the end, the moral you can take away from the story is that trying to live your life by what you *think* are other people's expectations for you will only make you miserable. Reading Laake's story, I keep wanting to say "Stick up for yourself!" and "Get over it!"
But, I read on salon.com that a while after this book became a bestseller, she committed suicide. While I disagree with many aspects of Mormonism (and of pretty much all religions - I'm an equal-opportunity atheist!), I don't think the religion she was brought up in was really responsible for her unhappiness in life. After all, plenty of people leave a religion without letting it ruin their life! The problem was her personal inability to decide what *she* wanted from life, and to go out and find it.

[Rae · Rating 1 out of 5]

A poorly written, almost Harlequinesque, highly sensational account of an ex-Mormon woman's experiences at BYU, in the temple, and in marriage. Not worth the paper it was printed on. If you have questions, ask a real Mormon rather than relying on stuff like this...

[Lauren orso · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read this book because of some research on it i did ( http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/la... ), and it is decidedly NOT SILLY.

[Maria Fledgling Author Park · Rating 4 out of 5]

A heart rending account of a true believer in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who wrestles with the doctrine and ceremonies required of a woman.

I admire Deborah Laake's courage to go against the "secrecy code" and publish her account of her personal struggle. She shows great courage to be vulnerable to the depth of her soul.

As all of us must do at some times innour lives, she manages to reconcile who she is with what she chooses to believe. A touching book.

[dianne b. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pretty good book but i like to save 4 and 5 stars for brilliance. What an insane coaster ride a Mormon girlhood looks to a critically thinking mind. Which is why that sort is discouraged. "Intellectual", i hear, is a derogatory term to Mormons. What blew me away most was the prying into her most private self so that untrained and horribly sexist white men could decide her worthiness.

She describes her Temple marriage (which sounds like a cartoon version of a Masonic' rite) during which she heard nothing of "love" or "charity" rather she was shown how to disembowel herself should she share the secrets of this club. She learns: "The mysteries of the world were fraternity rituals” complete with funky handshakes.
The rules are so rigid, so fragile - that anything but complete, unthinking obedience risks a ruined life - oh and a ruined next life, too.

She describes what are essentially spies that infiltrate and watch every aspect of Mormon’s lives to make sure they aren’t straying from the official line, to McCarthy era tactics - with much the same outcome - the threat of blackballing folks from the guarantee of eternal life. Sick.

Obedience and conformity...scarily Stepford-esque, with an absolutely NOT merit based, rather testosterone based, hierarchy: 1. god above 2. man (only temporarily- until said man becomes a god of his own; ruling over another planet) both WAY above: 3. women & children who should look to men for all the answers, and all the judgements. Can you imagine being grilled on the frequency of masterbation by a lay minister - who has no more training in psychology, sexuality or religion than your little brother - and having your answer decide your fate - not just in this life - but forever and ever amen? Arrrgh

[LWF · Rating 4 out of 5]

Living in a huge Mormon community, it was eye opening to read this book. It shows how the LDS church values male priesthood authority above all else. How a female cannot get to the celestial kingdom (the highest level of heaven) without having a husband to bring her there. If I had any thoughts of ever entertaining this religion, this book sealed the deal not too.

I felt the author has a lot of mental health issues, not sure why, if she was born with her issues or if they were caused by her church? The author never tells us exactly what her mental health issue is or was, so we never find out why she had so many problems.

If the LDS church has a problem with this book, I feel sorry for them as I think the author was truly telling her personal story. All of the "secrets" in this book can easily be found online and nothing has been revealed that you can't find on your own.

My heart ached for the author as I read the personal details of this book. The sexual details that the Mormon men in her life expected her to tell them in order for her to keep her Temple recommend. Makes me think that the priesthood guys are all a bunch of perverts.

[Aleisha · Rating 1 out of 5]

A client gave me this book to read...it was shocking but I am unsure how much is true. It is the story of a girl raised in the mormon church and her struggles in marriage along with details of the church practices. May be offensive to members of the church and I don't recommend taking everything she says as the truth.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for task #12 of Book Riot's Read Harder challenge 2020: a religious memoir. Technically it's a religious memoir from a religion other than yours (mine), but as I'm an atheist that's pretty much all of them, so I plumped for the first suitable book I found in the library... it really was a lucky dip. And an extremely interesting one! What I know of Mormonism is vanishingly little, and Laake's experience seems to indicate that's no great loss. Her memoir focuses on her time as a young wife, trying to conform to a religion that makes her increasingly unhappy, and the continuing tension between expectation and experience ultimately drives her to a mental breakdown. Yet the book is primarily a positive one* that shows Laake learning and growing and, in the end, welcoming the outside world, and there is an undercurrent of wry humour here that is both funny and very very sad. When the young Mormon couple visit a gynaecologist, for example, because Laake is having orgasms and they are both completely flummoxed about what is happening to her and what might be wrong... it's not funny at all and yet it is.

*Markedly less funny is that, after I read the book, I went to look up the author and found that she eventually died from suicide. Not gonna lie, that really undercuts the positive ending. It's still an extremely well-written and likeable memoir about the stranglehold religion can place on a life, however, so I'd say go ahead and read it anyway, and remember Laake for her successes and bravery instead.

[Pacifickat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a memoir about religious deconstruction/deconversion written in 1993, long before the current media fascination with cults and religious trauma became a viral trend, or the broad deconstruction movement of many protestant Americans out of fundamentalist Christian sects and conservative Evangelicalism really took off following the 2016 US presidential election and Covid 19 pandemic. 

While Laake's opinions and interpretation of events sometimes show their age (she grew up in the 1960's and religiously deconstructed through the 1970's and 80's), I found her storytelling honest, compelling, and often brimming with retrospective empathy for her younger self and others in her life. 

"The actions that were going to guarantee my entrance at the gates would have nothing to do with love or charity or the teachings of Christ that I had been raised to believe God valued. In fact, I hadn't heard a single one of those words spoken today, the most primary day of religious instruction in my entire life. No, I was going to burst into heaven on the basis of mumbo jumbo. God must never have gotten past that carefree period of mortal development when he'd formed a club with little pals and refused to let them into the tree fort without a password. The mysteries of the world were fraternity rituals."

"I shut the bathroom door and leaned against it, heaving not with sobs but with desperation. Trying to pull myself together, I slid down into the crouch of a baseball catcher and bounced nervously, wrestling honestly for the first time with a thought that God, who had from my earliest memories wrapped himself around my heart, who had always been kind to me, couldn't want this."

It was enormously sad to me to find out Laake died by suicide in her late 40's after a nearly lifelong struggle with depression. 

[Allison]

Published in 1993, this memoir recounts events that occurred in the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Given the changing nature of the LDS faith and society in general, what was once a relatively contemporaneous and somewhat sensational account should now be viewed through a historical lens. Readers like myself who are not members of the faith will have no way of assessing the fairness and accuracy of Laake's account, and the secret ceremonies she describes have likely been "updated" over time. According to a Wikipedia page, shortly after this book was published, Laake was excommunicated from the church for apostasy. She later died by suicide.

I accepted this as a personally truthful account, if only because the author was so willing to bare her own humiliating actions and inner thoughts. Laake was unbelievably naïve and superficial, routinely judging male partners based on physical characteristics such as their height, hair, and abs. Is this brutal honesty, a grievous character flaw, or merely an extension of the fact that traditional Morman life emphasizes appearances (particularly of the family configuration) so much?

[Tessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE! Such a well-written, energizing, addicting and truthful exposé. Compelling until the last page of the afterward. This story remains deeply necessary.

[Aiisa]

I lived in Utah for a number of years and reading books relating to the dominate religion of the area has provided a lot of insight into the culture of that state.

I can see how beliefs that one is raised with can really stick in your sub-conscious, and mold your behaviors long after you consciously choose to leave them behind. Mormonism is a very strange belief system, and I truely wonder at the highly educated individuals with whom I am acquianted who are members of the LDS Church (and folks, I'm talking the likes of comp sci PhDs from MIT, etc) note: I lived in Utah for a number of years. Reading books relating to the dominate religion of the area has provided a lot of insight into the culture there.

[Nichole · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book because my biological dad and his family are Mormons and I was curious about the weird rumors I'd heard about the religion. This book starts out spilling all the juicy details, then veers off into this woman's battles with depression, low self esteem and possible mental illness. It's an interesting read.

[♥ Marlene♥ · Rating 3 out of 5]

on Wednesday, March 01, 2006 I wrote about this book:

Read this in a couple of hours. I was shocked to learn that the author had commited suicide a couple of years after this book was published.

It was a very interesting read. Not the best of writing but an interesting view on the Mormoms church.

[Jennie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Is this thing still around? I read it years ago and laughed my head off. It's nothing but the silly justifications and emotional ramblings of a mentally ill woman and bears little resemblance to reality.

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't what I expected. I am fascinated by the history of the Mormon church and its secretive ceremonies. You do get glimpses into these topics, but the book is really about one woman's journey into self discovery. It was an interesting read, just not what I was expecting.

[Nadine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book when it was first published. It was eye-opening and i learned a lot about practices in this cult. Hard to find this book but if you like to read testimonies of people's experiences in a cult and how they escaped, you'll like this one too.

[Hayseed · Rating 2 out of 5]

Supposedly Mormon secrets, but mostly about her descent into mental problems and how the church failed her expectations. Kind of a sad book

[Denidevine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Facinating look at a part of Mormonism...the author commited suicide after the book was out.

[Arizonagirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was recommended by a friend. It's an interesting glimpse into what it is like to be a Mormon woman coming to terms with depression, sexuality, and feminism.

[Traci Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book 14 was “Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman’s Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond” by Deborah Laake. This book landed in my lap via my husband who heard it mentioned in a crime podcast and was aware that I recently read several memoirs within this genre. Well, this one troubled me. I am a curious person and appreciated her sharing of rituals within the Temple; however, that also disturbed me as these are rituals that I am not supposed to know. Are these true? Maybe. I had the privilege of living and working in Salt Lake City post-graduate school and from my best recollection of stories shared, her revelations are similar to those I heard. During my duration in Utah, I became very familiar with “garments” and gained knowledge of the “sealing” and how to properly handle the garments with respect. Deborah’s life was full of debilitating struggle due to religious upbringing and understanding of authority and order as a woman and position in church. She suffered a lifetime of emotional distress and depression. This book has/was banned in several states. If you are interested in cultural differences and the personal account of the struggles by being raised within this culture, you may enjoy this book. (240 pages)