The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker

From the Publisher

Writer, actress, and gorgeous stand up comedian: Introducing the Mormon Tina Fey

It's lonely being a Mormon in New York City. So once again, Elna Baker attends the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance-a virgin in a room full of virgins doing the Macarena. Her Queen Bee costume, which involves a black funnel stuck to her butt for a stinger, isn't attracting the attention she'd anticipated. So once again, Elna is alone at the punch bowl, stocking up on generic Oreos, exactly where you'd expect to find a single Mormon who's also a Big Girl. But loneliness is nothing compared to what happens when she loses eighty pounds. . . . and falls in love with an atheist.

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance is the memoir of a girl who distresses her family when she chooses NYU over BYU. A girl who's cultivating an oxymoronic identity as a bold, educated, modern, funny, proper, abstinent, religious stand-up comic, equal parts wholesome and hot. As Elna test-drives her identity, she finds herself in the strangest scenarios including selling creepy, overpriced dolls to petulant children at FAO Schwarz and dressing a head wound with a maxi pad while on a date.

Kirkus Reviews

Debut memoir from a 20-something Mormon stand-up comedian. Baker was once just a funny fat girl weighing in at nearly 250 pounds. Then she rapidly shed the pounds ("In five and a half months I lost eighty pounds, which is the equivalent of pooping out a fourth grader") and emerged as a slim beauty, still funny and ready for romance-up to a point. The author writes that she was ready for some kind of amorous encounter, but as a practicing LDS believer, sex before marriage is prohibited-as is drinking. "Mormons are known for saying no," she writes. "No sex, no drugs, no alcohol and no caffeine. NO." So she relates, in unrelenting cuteness, her romantic adventures-not having sex with lots of dreamy guys, but kissing and telling all. For New York Mormon singles events, Baker concocted some truly unfortunate costumes, including a fortune cookie that got crushed and looked like a certain part of the female anatomy. She discusses her situation with The Almighty (a largely one-way discussion) and her struggles to suppress her sexuality while defending her spirituality: "I thought, he only wants to see me naked because I lost weight and I look more attractive now. And this only happened because I prayed and asked God for a miracle. Misusing my new body would be like taking a gift from God and defiling it . . . Is it right to suppress my sexuality? Or do religious choices just make me happy because I was trained to feel this way?" For the most part, Baker spins a witty girly-girl story, a romantic caper for ladies about trying to find a job, a boyfriend and, ultimately, herself. A sexy, lubricious outing by a formerly zaftig comic.

What People Are Saying

Ira Glass
"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)

George Dawes Green
"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)

Andrew Sean Greer
"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)

Mike Paterniti
"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)

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