Hemlock Journal, Issue 11

Book Review of Maureen Clark’s 

‘Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl’ 

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” Rumi asks in 

a chapter epigraph midway through Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl. For those of us not raised in a high-demand religion or culture, that’s a valid question you may ask yourself at various points in Maureen Clark’s new memoir. 

As someone raised in a different culture, I didn’t fully understand the anguish of living half-in, half-out of a tightly knit faith community or the cost of exiting. Nor did I understand the heavy shame and fear of being “cast into the outer darkness” that Clark and others carry, for sins ranging from asking questions about Mother-in-Heaven all the way to adultery. Clark articulates her experience, from being born into a loving Mormon family through her decades-long deconstruction, in such a captivating and painfully honest way that her audience will completely understand what is at stake. 

I didn’t expect such a compelling read about a mostly interior journey – especially one where the title already gives away the ending. Her clear and confiding voice, the revelations about life inside the LDS church, and the evolution of her marriage pulled me in and kept me there, however. 

“There was never a time when I wasn’t deeply loved,” she says of her Utah childhood among extended family, and that secure emotional scaffolding supports her growth into a strong, 

talented, curious (and somewhat mischievous!) young woman. Despite plans for her bachelor’s degree, she’s swept away by love at college and suddenly ends up taking the idealized path for a Mormon woman – married just before her 19 th birthday and expecting their first baby that same year. 

It's that wedding ceremony that is the catalyst at the heart of the book. The much-anticipated temple experience that might have preceded a standard and loving Mormon marriage instead horrifies them and “knocks them sideways.” They go from an elated young couple to “two children holding hands in the dark,” on the side of a highway, shaken to their core. 

The thread of tension running through the book is how differently they each handle that foundational earthquake and what their choices cost them. 

We follow Clark through motherhood, rocky marital patches, many job-driven interstate moves, and come to a turning point: the reclaiming of her individual identity. Her determination to finish her long-abandoned bachelor’s degree is the final stage of her deconstruction. Discovering the work of early twentieth-century poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) elucidated the parallel 230 

struggles of a woman fighting against traditional expectations and helped her see the LDS church as a “building that needed its top blown off” so people can better see the sky. The ideas of Hildegarde of Bingen showed her she was strong enough to make a spiritual leap. 

The church’s emphasis on perfectionism – physical, moral, and spiritual – hums in the background like the sound of a distant buzzsaw. Our shared culture’s unattainable and usually contradictory expectations of women are amplified tenfold by Mormon culture. More than a struggle of personhood for her, it’s a yardstick measuring her as “every character in this play”: a perfect daughter, mother, neighbor, friend, Mormon “sister,” and wife. She knows she’ll be judged much more harshly for her failure of faith than her husband. 

Clark’s credentials as a talented poet inform the language and structure of her memoir. She evokes a powerful sense of place, whether it’s small-town Utah, the deep existential cold of North Dakota, or the rich verdancy of her writing retreat at the Vermont Studios that bookends her story. One of the most beautifully written sections of the book is the bone-chilling but unifying winter the family spent in Fargo: your subconscious will nudge you to put on a sweater while reading. 

The story is structured in short chapters divided into vignettes, and nimbly navigates past, present, and future to build a layered but cohesive narrative. The structure also embodies the looping all-in-to-almost-out spiritual spiral she walks through different stages of her life, caught between her “love for the LDS people and her hate for the LDS bureaucracy.” 

“Wasn’t it beautiful when you believed in everything?” asks the epigraph of an early chapter. From the cradle of a loving family who practiced an older, kinder version of Mormonism to the community support the church offered through her nomadic years, we’re shown beautiful aspects of the faith. When the dark corners and damaging strictures of the modern-day LDS church become too hard to ignore, Clark shows us it’s possible to make our way back to beauty, and bravely takes us along with her “in search of a messy heaven.” 

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Title: Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl 

Author: Maureen Clark 

Publisher: Hypatia Press 

Publication Date: 15 June 2026 

Language: English 

Page Count: 282 Pages 

Purchase links: 

Buy Here 

About the Author: 

About the Reviewer: 

Jennifer Blackledge is a Detroit-area poet who works in the automotive industry. She is the recipient of the 2025 Zocalo Public Square Poetry Prize and her work has appeared in publications like JAMA, Rattle, ONE ART, I-70 Review, Summerset Review, Kestrel, and more. Her book, Trashmore, will be published by Cornerstone Press in 2028. You can find her work at www.jenniferblackledge.com 

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