Today, she is happily single and childless, the executive managing editor of New Times, an alternative weekly newspaper in Phoenix. Hers is a tale of recovery from male dependence. After several botched suicide attempts, Laake was institutionalized for two years. She divorced, she married again (to a non-Mormon), and then again. Then came the “emotional battering” and early signs of psychological problems.

Or we secreted them inside cupboards, which we cracked open a little so that rubbers wouldn’t mold.” Then we left them on top of the toilet tank, shrouded in tissue.

“After use, we lathered our hands and scrubbed the condoms inside out. “Condoms were always taking a rest around our place,” she wrote in Secret Ceremonies. And when her father, who wanted the couple to delay parenthood, gave them 12 condoms, with instructions to re-use them because they were expensive, she obeyed him. I didn’t feel consecrated I felt like a fool.” “I was raised to see men as God incarnate, and for a second, the men running the temple seemed like a bunch of little boys guarding the entrance to their fort. “It was a nutty ceremony,” Laake said, shrugging her bare, garment-free shoulders and giggling. She married a fellow student who, she said, she never loved but accepted because he told her that she was his God-ordained “one.” They were joined in a sacred temple ceremony that included secret names, handshakes, anointments, pageantry and the receiving of “garments,” the long johns that Mormons wear underneath their clothes to protect them from evil. The veil of her particular indoctrination parted briefly during her first wedding. “You can’t underestimate the effects of religious indoctrination.” Was she immune to the winds of the Woodstock Nation buffeting the country? “Completely impervious,” she said. She spent hours applying makeup and, equipped with steamer trunks full of monogrammed cashmere sweaters, she went to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, to seek her destiny. As long as I did what God wanted, my life would be perfect.”Įven in 1972, when other college students were slipping into Indian prints and Birkenstocks to protest racism, dress codes and war, Laake’s faith was unshakable. “Oh, my mother worried that I was tall and smart and would have a tough time snagging a husband,” she said. In the meantime, Laake trusted that her life would be a shiny progression of late-model station wagons and well-scrubbed baby Mormons. The youngest of four children and the only daughter of a wealthy insurance salesman and his wife, Laake grew up pampered in Florida, never doubting that God would send her a husband who, in the Mormon tradition, would eventually allow them to enter the highest level of heaven.

Secret ceremonies by deborah laake