What surprised you most while you were looking back at your life through this book?
With cameras in my face, my hand would be forced in one direction or the other.”īelow, Gay opens up rediscovering herself outside of the church, how Mormonism still informs her life, and where she stands with her castmates. “You could choose Hollywood, but you’d have to give up heaven. “There was no gray area, no in between,” Gay, 48, writes in the book. Leaving the church was a leap she says she couldn’t have made without Bravo’s cameras, which offered a chance to start over that was equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Reality TV memoirs are a cottage industry with varying degrees of literary merit, but Gay’s book has major stakes: In tracing her journey from aspiring housewife to capital-H Housewife, she writes about Mormonism’s sacred rituals in manner that is not only grounds for excommunication in the church but also risks ostracization from the entire community she held dear for so long.
In her new book, Bad Mormon, out now, she blows that process wide open. (I even had pioneer ancestors dating back to 1856, just like the ones Gay proudly referenced in her Season 1 tagline.)Īnd just like Gay, I also grappled with a painful, yearslong process of breaking with ancestral tradition and leaving the church. We share a number of milestone experiences: growing up in Utah, preaching the gospel as missionaries, and graduating from the strict, punitive Brigham Young University.
But there was another reason I felt drawn to the beauty entrepreneur and divorced mother of three: Like her, I had spent the first decades of my life as a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City premiered in 2020, Heather Gay was an immediate fan favorite for her self-deprecating wit and everywoman relatability.
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