Maureen Clark - Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl, Hypatia Press, 2026. Reviewed by Andrew Dash Gillman, August 10, 2026.
There is a broken fairytale sensationalism in the title of Maureen Clark’s Memoir Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl. The writer builds the melodrama on the back cover blurb in describing the “horrifying start” of her wedding to husband Jon from the startling language of the temple endowment. But this book is not about secret ceremonies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). That’s another writer’s project, and a less useful one. Instead, through her thoughtful juxtaposition of past and present on a long and traumatic journey to leaving the church, Clark rejects fear and guilt to emerge as a spiritual guide, weathered and wise, for present-day skeptics, feeling caught in a Latter-day lie.
To be clear, Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl contains confessions that in the light of the conservative church might be characterized as downright salacious. What’s more, such characterizations tap a central tension in the book: that the church has its position, and Clark has hers, and their worldviews stretched until the overlap between them broke. It’s not a spoiler to say that Clark leaves the church. Amid grappling with real loss of community and identity, she has to be insistent about her point that the church is not true, initially in the tentative form of the “big lies” the church propagates, then in the personal and linguistic breakthrough that “the LDS church is a lie.”
The book’s inciting moment is husband Jon’s decision to leave the church. As Clark makes clear, that bombshell announcement could end in estrangement or separation as it rattles her core, despite her own mixed feelings and increasing distance from the “new, humorless church.” They are open-minded and willing to ask questions when the church prefers you “don’t ask questions.” She gravitates to unconditional love where the church rejects it. Clark describes their “interesting” position in their neighborhood: “we were one of the artistic families…the liberals.”
By Clark’s accounting, the lies of the LDS Church are innumerable, and perhaps easiest among them is the rapid demythologization that can occur under the magnifying glass of higher criticism, once Clark “deconstructed the Mormon stories” as she describes through anguish, hatred, and loneliness in the powerful chapter called “Indecision” that recognition is why Clark perceives church leaders stuck in corners “where they refused to see evidence or logic about their own past.”
There’s a modern feminist thread through Confessions that in its simplest form ties education to rejecting the church’s explicit patriarchy, itself one strand in a nearly universal history of suppressing women’s voices. Clark’s access to education was delayed primarily by unexpected pregnancy and motherhood, in some ways falling in line explicitly with the church’s plans for young women “when the trajectory of my life was laid out in a straight line” by the church to “get married, have babies, [and] serve her family and her faith.” But Confessions isn’t about regret. Regret would have been not writing this memoir, which is not about sharing private details from a Mormon woman’s difficult path to leaving the church, but about showing the way to others who might wish to follow.
There’s an emotionally powerful sequence of about 30 pages between when 6-year-old Clark climbs into a hospital bed with her ailing grandmother and when she has a delicate conversation with her adult son where Clark explores the many corners of grief, psychological trauma, and shame, pressing on the walls for any weakness and way out. All these memories might have stayed sequestered. Instead they come alive in Confessions. In the middle of that sequence Clark reflects on what she calls the “All or Nothing Church” that obligated her to make a decision. “Should I make the ultimate sacrifice for this belief system and stay in the church?” What matters, ultimately, is that she had the choice. Clark understands that the women who came before her didn’t. “My female ancestors said yes with their lives, but positively no with their spirits.”
Something happens linguistically and structurally partway through the novel, around the time Clark goes to graduate school (which “took down the walls”), wherein the text’s interplay between past and present gels into wide-eyed understanding. “Graduate school was helping me name the problems I had with my religious experience, to find a concrete language for this place where I stood, a mature woman who was speaking from her own soul,” Clark writes. It is this awakening that grabs attention. Indeed, a big revelation of Clark’s text is not a couple of unseemly details about the temple endowment the back cover relates, but that the endowment ceremony plagiarized John Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost” and Satan’s temptation of humankind.
I am not very familiar with Clark’s work as a poet. There are sentences, passages, and sections, though, where the poetry wonderfully absorbs the prose to sensory abstraction, obligating the reader to understand through feeling rather than reading.
Heaven was a full peach moon when I was a child; it filled my nights with a glowing light. It followed me in the back window of the car …There were times I could swear that I’d swallowed that moon, a glow coming from inside me shining from my eyes.
There were times when Clark subtly undercuts herself, such as when her pregnancy creates an uncomfortable relationship with her temple garments and she acknowledges it never occurred to her to stop wearing them. It is an inherently troubling moment, but she unnecessarily asks, “How sad is that?” Still, such moments are part of the internal tension driving the opening chapters. A microcosm of that tension occurs in the jump cut transition between Clark’s early sexuality felt in a Truth or Dare experience and the fundamental “shame and guilt” inflicted by religion (and specifically the LDS Church) on matters of sex. Layer fear and trauma on shame and guilt and it’s easier for an outsider to understand why Clark struggled for so long to make her decision to leave the church and possibly why she felt called to vocalize her convictions.
This is not a self-help book. The spiritual guidance in the text has to be interpreted and learned through examination and attention. Clark has something to share from her journey. Her certainty about the lie will make Confessions immediately inaccessible for some readers, but it is important because in the present moment, where we encounter Clark, she is unburdened, wiser, and joyful. In the beginning, “religion insisted there is a plan for each of us.” By the end, Clark is an empowered woman—educated, independent, possibly even genuinely happy. And between the lines a template appears for readers: “Writing this now I can see the terrible repetition of my life in all the young women who grew up in the Church.”
When college “ignites” Clark’s brain and she gets feelings of being an autonomous being, she realizes “I didn’t need Jon or my kids to be worth something. I did not need the church to define my worth. A truly radical thought.” This is, of course, not a radical thought. Or shouldn’t be. The challenge in Clark's approach is that this important claim risks flying by or landing too quietly for readers not already inside her worldview. But the reward is a more honest, less prescriptive book fully worth the investment of time and attention.
There is a broken fairytale sensationalism in the title of Maureen Clark’s Memoir Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl. The writer builds the melodrama on the back cover blurb in describing the “horrifying start” of her wedding to husband Jon from the startling language of the temple endowment. But this book is not about secret ceremonies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). That’s another writer’s project, and a less useful one. Instead, through her thoughtful juxtaposition of past and present on a long and traumatic journey to leaving the church, Clark rejects fear and guilt to emerge as a spiritual guide, weathered and wise, for present-day skeptics, feeling caught in a Latter-day lie.
To be clear, Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl contains confessions that in the light of the conservative church might be characterized as downright salacious. What’s more, such characterizations tap a central tension in the book: that the church has its position, and Clark has hers, and their worldviews stretched until the overlap between them broke. It’s not a spoiler to say that Clark leaves the church. Amid grappling with real loss of community and identity, she has to be insistent about her point that the church is not true, initially in the tentative form of the “big lies” the church propagates, then in the personal and linguistic breakthrough that “the LDS church is a lie.”
The book’s inciting moment is husband Jon’s decision to leave the church. As Clark makes clear, that bombshell announcement could end in estrangement or separation as it rattles her core, despite her own mixed feelings and increasing distance from the “new, humorless church.” They are open-minded and willing to ask questions when the church prefers you “don’t ask questions.” She gravitates to unconditional love where the church rejects it. Clark describes their “interesting” position in their neighborhood: “we were one of the artistic families…the liberals.”
By Clark’s accounting, the lies of the LDS Church are innumerable, and perhaps easiest among them is the rapid demythologization that can occur under the magnifying glass of higher criticism, once Clark “deconstructed the Mormon stories” as she describes through anguish, hatred, and loneliness in the powerful chapter called “Indecision” that recognition is why Clark perceives church leaders stuck in corners “where they refused to see evidence or logic about their own past.”
There’s a modern feminist thread through Confessions that in its simplest form ties education to rejecting the church’s explicit patriarchy, itself one strand in a nearly universal history of suppressing women’s voices. Clark’s access to education was delayed primarily by unexpected pregnancy and motherhood, in some ways falling in line explicitly with the church’s plans for young women “when the trajectory of my life was laid out in a straight line” by the church to “get married, have babies, [and] serve her family and her faith.” But Confessions isn’t about regret. Regret would have been not writing this memoir, which is not about sharing private details from a Mormon woman’s difficult path to leaving the church, but about showing the way to others who might wish to follow.
There’s an emotionally powerful sequence of about 30 pages between when 6-year-old Clark climbs into a hospital bed with her ailing grandmother and when she has a delicate conversation with her adult son where Clark explores the many corners of grief, psychological trauma, and shame, pressing on the walls for any weakness and way out. All these memories might have stayed sequestered. Instead they come alive in Confessions. In the middle of that sequence Clark reflects on what she calls the “All or Nothing Church” that obligated her to make a decision. “Should I make the ultimate sacrifice for this belief system and stay in the church?” What matters, ultimately, is that she had the choice. Clark understands that the women who came before her didn’t. “My female ancestors said yes with their lives, but positively no with their spirits.”
Something happens linguistically and structurally partway through the novel, around the time Clark goes to graduate school (which “took down the walls”), wherein the text’s interplay between past and present gels into wide-eyed understanding. “Graduate school was helping me name the problems I had with my religious experience, to find a concrete language for this place where I stood, a mature woman who was speaking from her own soul,” Clark writes. It is this awakening that grabs attention. Indeed, a big revelation of Clark’s text is not a couple of unseemly details about the temple endowment the back cover relates, but that the endowment ceremony plagiarized John Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost” and Satan’s temptation of humankind.
I am not very familiar with Clark’s work as a poet. There are sentences, passages, and sections, though, where the poetry wonderfully absorbs the prose to sensory abstraction, obligating the reader to understand through feeling rather than reading.
Heaven was a full peach moon when I was a child; it filled my nights with a glowing light. It followed me in the back window of the car …There were times I could swear that I’d swallowed that moon, a glow coming from inside me shining from my eyes.
There were times when Clark subtly undercuts herself, such as when her pregnancy creates an uncomfortable relationship with her temple garments and she acknowledges it never occurred to her to stop wearing them. It is an inherently troubling moment, but she unnecessarily asks, “How sad is that?” Still, such moments are part of the internal tension driving the opening chapters. A microcosm of that tension occurs in the jump cut transition between Clark’s early sexuality felt in a Truth or Dare experience and the fundamental “shame and guilt” inflicted by religion (and specifically the LDS Church) on matters of sex. Layer fear and trauma on shame and guilt and it’s easier for an outsider to understand why Clark struggled for so long to make her decision to leave the church and possibly why she felt called to vocalize her convictions.
This is not a self-help book. The spiritual guidance in the text has to be interpreted and learned through examination and attention. Clark has something to share from her journey. Her certainty about the lie will make Confessions immediately inaccessible for some readers, but it is important because in the present moment, where we encounter Clark, she is unburdened, wiser, and joyful. In the beginning, “religion insisted there is a plan for each of us.” By the end, Clark is an empowered woman—educated, independent, possibly even genuinely happy. And between the lines a template appears for readers: “Writing this now I can see the terrible repetition of my life in all the young women who grew up in the Church.”
When college “ignites” Clark’s brain and she gets feelings of being an autonomous being, she realizes “I didn’t need Jon or my kids to be worth something. I did not need the church to define my worth. A truly radical thought.” This is, of course, not a radical thought. Or shouldn’t be. The challenge in Clark's approach is that this important claim risks flying by or landing too quietly for readers not already inside her worldview. But the reward is a more honest, less prescriptive book fully worth the investment of time and attention.