SUNSTONE tricacies of LDS visiting teaching to a general REVIEW ESSAY audience. And some of her stories of the people and culture at Harvard were so crazy, my mouth would drop open. Like the feminist graduate AN EXHAUSTED MEMOIR OF student who escorted her home from class one day after she had fainted from morning READING LEAVING THE SAINTS sickness only to excoriate her for faking something that made all women look weak (80–81). Or her husband’s advisor who in- LEAVING THE SAINTS: HOW I LOST THE formed him in shocked tones that to keep a MORMONS AND FOUND MY FAITH Down syndrome child would cost him his career—after all, the professor had decided his wife should abort her first pregnancy be- by Martha Beck cause it didn’t fit in with his career schedule Crown Publishers, 2005 (205–07). I had never encountered anything re- 320 pages, $24.95 motely so extreme at Princeton. But maybe Harvard was much more cutthroat. Or Reviewed by Tania Rands Lyon maybe things were different in academia in the late eighties and had mellowed by the time I arrived in my program nearly a decade later. But what a wonderful writer—what sharp The daughter of venerable LDS scholar Hugh wit, what elegant turns of phrases, what pro- found insights into the meaning of life, and Nibley has written an explosive memoir in which what a litany of enviable and dramatic en- she accuses him of sexually abusing her as a counters with the divine. In spite of Martha’s off-the-charts—but child. Is it just another boilerplate ex-Mormon also very funny—caricatures of Utah, diatribe or a thoughtful and inspiring faith Harvard, and her family, I fell in love with the book and came away exhilarated and in- journey? How is the reader to judge? spired. In the years between Expecting Adam (1999) and Leaving the Saints (2005), I BOUT FIVE YEARS ago, I devoured between a spiritual, family-centered life on learned a little more about Martha and the Martha Beck’s first memoir, Expecting one hand and a rarefied high-achieving acad- Nibley family. I heard that many who knew A Adam, a moving, memorable, jaw- emic environment on the other. It was like Martha challenged the honesty of her narra- dropping, side-splitting account of how she finding a smarter, more articulate, much fun- tive in Expecting Adam. Most notable was a and her husband were pulled up short in the nier version of myself to whom very intense letter from Zina Petersen, Martha’s younger middle of their high-powered Harvard grad- things happened all the time. sister, written in response to a book review uate student lives when the child Martha was Halfway through the book, a one-sentence posted to the Association for Mormon Letters carrying was diagnosed with Down syn- description of the author’s father revealed that (AML) email list.1 The letter described aston- drome. I remember hunching over the book Martha was Hugh Nibley’s daughter. It sud- ishment that Martha could have recast the in an airport terminal en route from central denly gave the humorous but stinging de- events of those months and years leading up Maine (where my new husband had a scription of her family greater weight. I felt to Adam’s birth in such a completely different teaching job) to Princeton, New Jersey voyeuristic, like I was reading a tabloid ex- way from how Zina had heard Martha de- (where I was still working on my Ph.D. in so- posé of a celebrity. I marveled at her cutting scribe them at the time. I remember feeling ciology), embarrassed to find myself honesty and wondered what her relationship deeply disappointed that I could no longer laughing out loud one minute and wiping with her family (and her in-laws) must be like quite trust my experience with Expecting away tears the next. I was as enamored with to publish about them so caustically. Adam. the book as I was with the existence of such a Sure, there were some disingenuous mo- I also heard that Martha had accused her writer. Here was a fellow, Mormon-raised, ments, like the two women she “met at a father of sexual abuse. It was a shock, but I Ivy League sociology graduate student party once” showing up suddenly at her door knew enough stories of upstanding Mormon (studying gender, no less—we even had the in time of great need. But she was obviously men molesting children not to write off the same subfield!), wrestling with religious downplaying her Mormonism in the book, rumors based on Hugh Nibley’s status alone. truths, mystical experiences, and the tension and maybe she didn’t want to explain the in- With no other information, I put it on the shelf along with other Bits of Information I TANIA RANDS LYON is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Princeton (Ph.D., sociology). She currently Cannot Verify. works as a consultant for improving health care in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; teaches Gospel Principles In 2002, I read Boyd Petersen’s authorized in her ward; and is the mother of two daughters. biography, Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life. It PAGE 62 MARCH 2005 SUNSTONE felt like a fair treatment of a complex person, • Waking up repeatedly in the ring) and circumstantial evidence that her fa- respectful but not worshipful. Wondering ensuing years to find her body in ther was the perpetrator (210). She hypothe- whether Petersen would deal with Martha’s the same frog-legged wrists-crossed sizes that his horrible deeds emerged out of a claims of abuse, I was interested to find a position of her memories. particularly volatile stress cocktail. The brief mention in the text dismissing the (119–20) groundwork for her father’s instability was claim, and a more extended rebuttal in a • A “life-long strange reaction to laid by his own sexual abuse at the hands of lengthy footnote.2 According to Petersen all things Egyptian,” especially im- his mother and posttraumatic stress from his (Martha’s brother-in-law as well as Hugh’s bi- ages of the crocodile-headed Amut experiences during WWII. The final straw, ographer), Martha used questionable means the Destroyer. (146–47) she suggests, came when Martha was five to recall repressed memories at a time when • A desire to commit suicide and the LDS church asked Nibley to translate False Memory Syndrome was at its peak in dating back to age six, and a life- the newly acquired Joseph Smith papyri and the U.S. Although family members did not threatening case of anorexia use his scholarship to defend the Church’s take the accusation lightly, ultimately none of throughout adolescence. (62) claims regarding the Book of Abraham. them could corroborate it. • A life-long inability to feel Claiming that this put him in an impossible emotion, and the sensation of ex- bind, as Joseph Smith’s translation was inde- OW Leaving the Saints has arrived, periencing life through a pane of fensible, she suggests her father went crazy and Martha is telling her story her glass, one step removed. (200) and she became the unwitting victim of his N way. The gist of her second memoir Over time, she came to believe that she delusions. is this: In 1988, after Adam’s birth, Martha had been ritually raped by her father over the Mixed in with this intensely personal and her husband John left Harvard to finish their Ph.D.s in the more accepting and sup- portive environment of Provo, Utah. Both By the end of the first reading, I was began teaching part-time at BYU. In response to the miracles surrounding her pregnancy persuaded. I hated most of the book, with Adam, Martha began reading vora- ciously about mystical religious experience and how to attain it. She frames her personal doubted many of the details, was journey in terms of the Buddhist phases: camel, lion, child. She says she decided to disappointed in her relentlessly throw herself full force into Mormon reli- gious observance (the camel phase). In 1991, negative and ridiculous caricature after she observed a confessional classroom discussion of childhood sexual abuse, Martha hit a turning point. She had sudden of the LDS Church and culture, hemorrhaging that sent her into emergency surgery, where she had an exquisite en- questioned some internal consistencies; counter with a White Light. When she got home, awash in the joy of that experience, but I believed that she had been abused she was hit with the first horrific flashbacks of being raped by her father. In her memory, by her father. she heard references to Egypt and to Joseph Smith and was under the impression that her father was performing a kind of Abrahamic sacrifice. That’s when I had to put the book course of three years, from age five until right story of abuse is Martha’s description of her down for a little while. before she was baptized at age eight. One of path out of the church of her heritage pep- Martha claims she meditated, prayed, the most damning accounts in the book de- pered with wonderful anecdotes, wise cried a lot, and gradually found multiple scribes a phone call she had with her mother quotes, and spiritual insights. One of my fa- memories and experiences coalescing into a not long after the memories hit and she vorites is her account of trying to get a fam- more coherent picture of her past: stopped visiting her parents.