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Overview
It's lonely being a Mormon in New York City. Every year, Elna Baker attends the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. This year, her Queen Bee costume (which involves a funnel stinger stuck to her butt) isn't attracting the attention she'd anticipated. So once again, Elna finds herself alone, standing at the punch bowl, stocking up on Oreos, a virgin in a room full of thirty-year-old virgins doing the Funky Chicken. But loneliness is nothing compared to what Elna feels when she loses eighty pounds, finds herself suddenly beautiful... and in love with an atheist.
Brazenly honest, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance is Elna Baker's hilarious and heartfelt chronicle of her attempt to find love in a city full of strangers and see if she can steer clear of temptation and just get by on God.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781101148778 |
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Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 10/15/2009 |
Sold by: | Penguin Group |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 288 |
File size: | 1 MB |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
"Is there a stronger subject than the struggle for love, or a better way to face it than to laugh? Baker has got the curse to live absurdly, the gift to tell it honestly, and the nerve to break our hearts. G*d@#n her talent."--(Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli)
"This is an amazingly exuberant memoir. Like Pocahontas or Mr. Spock or Ariel the Mermaid, Elna Baker's caught between two incompatible worlds. She loves them both so fully, it's heartbreaking to think that someday she'll have to choose one over the other. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would be a gimmicky, jokey book. Instead, it's heartfelt and funny, an insider's account of trying to live with real religious faith in a world of temptation."--(Ira Glass public radio personality, and host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life)
"Elna Baker's memoirs of Mormon chastity and self-denial are presented with such passion and wit and unbridled effervescence that somehow her life comes out as pure erotic adventure, a romance of wild sunshine hedonism. As she juggles it all before us -- her doubt and her deep faith and her lust and longing and fierce discipline-she's a dazzlement, a living breathing paradox and an absolute original and a joy to behold."--(George Dawes Green, Author of Ravens and The Juror, and Creator of The MOTH)
"Elna Baker leads with her heart... and hilarity... and the sparkle-eyed observations of a chaste ingénue searching for lasting love while hurtling headlong into life's most difficult questions. One dash Sex In the City and one dash Eat, Pray, Love, her memoir is an unflinching, kinetic revelation, opening a secret door on the pull between faith and carnality, expectation and desire, family and self. And yet Baker's rebellion brings her, and us, closer to an understanding of what we most crave from our deities, and each other: compassion, recognition, laughter, more laughter."--(Mike Paterniti, author of Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain)
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
Elna Baker has a background most people would consider exotic and unique. She graduated from New York University with a theatre degree after spending much of her life in London and Madrid. She's visited countries many Americans know only via news items and high school geography books. The problem is that she spent most of these years being overweight, and also, Mormon, and it's put her at a bit of a disadvantage as she attempts to enter the secular social scene of New York City after college. This city, filled with over-sexed, over-stimulated people of all ages, is more exotic and unfamiliar to her than any of the places she's visited beyond the United States.
Life in the city post-NYU, unemployed and a little directionless, serves her with some interesting life lessons. She sells ridiculously expensive dolls through an equally ridiculous "adoption program" at FAO Schwarz that teaches her about money, ethnic diversity among the rich and undeserving, and the actions she will and won't accept from other people. She learns that coming from a religious background championing abstinence from both premarital sexual conduct and alcohol can cause her some problems in the bar scene of New York City, particularly with members of the opposite gender. And she learns that she has limited control over her life in most aspects but one: her weight.
The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance is a funny, moving, eloquent memoir from a young woman who loses weight, becomes beautiful on the outside, and then has to reconcile this change with who she is—and always was—on the inside: a person who thinks critically and deeply about the world around her, and about how others receive her within that world. It details her quest for love within the bounds of religion and outside them, and her introspective examination of her own beliefs and values. It also shows that being misunderstood as a Mormon is nothing compared to having your homemade Fortune Cookie Halloween Costume mistaken for something very different on the subway.
ABOUT ELNA BAKER
Elna Baker is a Mormon stand-up comedian, writer and solo performer who specializes in comedic storytelling. She lives in New York City.
A CONVERSATION WITH ELNA BAKER
Q. You always wanted to be a writer growing up—did you ever imagine that your first book would be a memoir, and in particular a memoir about your experiences as a Mormon and your struggle with your weight? You mention at the end of the book that you found the time to write at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, but what gave you the impetus to write this book? Was it your breakup with Hayes, or with Matt, or at the behest of your friends on the storytelling/comedy scene?
Not in a million years did I imagine I'd write a memoir. As a kid I definitely dreamed of being a writer, but unlike acting, the medium seemed inaccessible. Only there was this other thing that I did naturally: I told stories. During and after college, my mentor, Elizabeth Swados, pushed me to start telling these stories on stage. I would bullet point the material for each show, but I never sat down and actually wrote anything out. My first writing opportunity came through ELLE magazine. After performing in a spoken-word Moth event for ELLE I got the opportunity to write a feature about how I was getting plastic surgery. This article sparked interest from publishers in both teen and Christian fiction—only that's not what I wanted to do, I always envisioned writing a more mainstream book. So instead, I went to Yaddo and started writing the stories that's always come so naturally—the result was the first 80 pages of my book.
Q. After a string of jobs loosely related to acting, you're no longer pursuing acting, but writing. This change in your ambition(s) isn't really covered in the memoir—how do you feel about changing careers? Describe, too, your writing for fashion magazines and your writing for the comedy stage—does it satisfy? Do you see it as a step towards something else?
Professionally, I don't know what I am (all I know is that I'm having an identity crisis as I try answering this). I love to write, I love comedy and I still love acting. At first I worried that writing was going to distract me from acting. Instead I feel like it has taught me to how to be a better actor. For example: in acting school they talked a lot about understanding the intentions of the characters we were portraying. I didn't get this concept until I was working on my book and I got to see how much my own intentions drove my life. It was a weird experience. I felt like I was seeing myself from above, as though I were God watching a character make choices and mistakes—unable to intervene or change the past. This was an enlightening experience on many levels. Now when I perform (whether it's my own comedy or whether I'm playing a character) I approach the role from the writer's perspective and I try to uncover the intention behind each decision the character makes.
Q. You also create comics, which deal with many of the same subjects as your memoir. How does this part of your creative life fit with the storytelling and comedy and work as a published author? What does it allow you to do that the other art forms do not?
I'm not an exceptional artist or anything (in fact, you'll notice the character I draw only faces out—this is not an artistic choice, I just can't draw profile!) but for me comics provide a way of saying things visually that I cannot otherwise express. When I feel blocked I like to draw. It helps me find the basic truth I'm looking for and the best part is that for whatever reason I don't take myself as seriously when I draw. This allows me to really open up and get goofy. I also love how comics can instantly communicate an idea—what would otherwise take three chapters can be nailed in one image if you get the drawing right. On that note, maybe I should take a drawing class? Knowing how to draw profile may very well expand my entire world.
Q. What are you focusing on right now? What will we see from you in the very near future?
Right now I'm developing a television show that I hope to write and perform in. The show picks up where the book left off. I don't want to give anything away, but after I finished writing the book I decided to take a break from being Mormon, like how the Amish have Rumspringa—but my own made up version since the only "break" allowed when you're a Mormon is the KitKat kind. My current writing reflects this period of my life and whether it ends up being a TV series or whether I write another book—this is what I hope to explore creatively.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS