Ex-Mormon Heather Gay: 'Once the fairy tale was a reality, they could have me do just about anything'

The ‘Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’ star released her first memoir in 2023. It doesn't hold back on the details of her life, her upbringing in the Church of Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church, and what made her decide to leave it.

On her book tour, she said the Mormon community is idyllic on the surface, but only if you fit the “beautiful, nuclear family that’s heterosexual” mold. She said it feels very safe unless you're different for whatever reason. Here’s what she reveals about how the religion defined her life and what made her leave...

In the memoir, thanks her family for bringing out her talent for the piano. “Thanks to the dutiful lessons of my homemaking mother and my Mormon desire to fill my house with music, I had been a child prodigy... winning state competitions and performing around the nation,” she wrote, although she never went professional.

Photo: Klara Kulikova / Unsplash

She said she felt different from a young age. In college, she realized she had a knack for business and even started a successful jewelry business that got accounts with Nordstrom. "Being a businesswoman was not a mark of success in my family nor my community. If I brought it up, they just asked if I was dating someone and changed the subject," she wrote.

When Gay was 21, she graduated from Brigham Young University with a business and a humanities degree but thought she was a failure because she still hadn’t married. That’s when she went to France to do missionary work.

After returning from France, Gay married her husband Billy, who she describes as 'Mormon royalty,' just three and a half months after they started dating. On the Honeymoon, although she enjoyed the physical part (for the first time), she realized they had nothing in common.

Photo: Bravo / Real Housewives of Salt Lake City

Despite her college, business, and musical experience, she quickly had three girls and became a stay-at-home mom, a role she said she was taught to believe would be her eternal destiny.

In the book, she described how the religious doctrine oppressed her. "It was the castle on a cloud. Once the fairy tale was a reality, they could have me do just about anything... In the temple, men make covenants that bestow them with “dominion over all the earth and the inhabitants therein,” and women make covenants to obey them. I was taught to say “no” to a lot of things outside of our faith. But inside the faith, I was taught only to bow my head and say “yes.”

She said she lived happily as a Mormon until her husband left her abruptly. "The divorce caused my entire world and community to implode," she said. She tried to get back into the community but was an outcast because she didn’t remarry immediately.

She writes that the stress from her divorce was so high that she developed Bell's palsy, where half her face was temporarily paralyzed.

Image:'The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City' Reunion / Bravo

In the memoir, she explains “doubling down on the church” once she started losing her faith. But getting a job where she worked with an ex-Mormon really helped her clarify her views, and she began questioning its doctrine around LGBT people and women.

Image:'The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City' / Bravo

In the memoir, Gay explains how although she was questioning, she consulted her Mormon bishop about going on ‘Real Housewives’. The bishop said she shouldn’t, but if she did, to "carry around a glass of milk when you’re at parties with alcohol," presumably so other Mormons wouldn’t think she was drinking.

On 'Real Housewives,' she was open about her struggles leaving the religion. In her memoir she gets into the details, explaining how tough it was to leave as a middle-aged woman because every big life decision she had made was related to her being part of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Gay says she is currently “being sued by the church” for trying to trademark “Bad Mormon,” the title of her memoir, which she also uses for other merchandise. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the church retains “trademarks on multiple variations of the term Mormon.”

Photo: Brie Odom-Mabey / Unsplash

On the book tour, she said she’s starting a whole new chapter of her life because of ‘Real Housewives.’ The show premiered in 2019, the same year she definitely decided to leave the church and instead embrace dating, drinking and sharing her thoughts on the doctrine openly.

On the talk show The Social, Gay said she was at first scared that her family would read the book, but in the days before publication, she confessed that she was now more scared that they wouldn’t read it. Most of her family members are still Mormon.

In the same interview, she said some of her friends who she grew up with read the memoir and asked her to change their names. “It was sad because it was just being normal teenagers… but we grew up in an insular community with very strict standards of behavior, and there’s a lot of cultural currency in being a good Mormon.”

Image: 'Bad Mormon' by Heather Gay, Gallery Books

Writing the memoir, she told the New York Times, was the first time she’s been able to reflect on her life and fallout with Mormonism clearly. She said she hopes the book will help others like her feel comfortable embracing their true selves and not so isolated.

Salt Lake City is arguably home to some of the most intense drama of the whole ‘Real Housewives’ franchise. One cast member, Jen Shah (left), pled guilty to fraud in 2022 and was sentenced to six years in prison.

Mary Cosby, another cast member, said she married her stepfather to inherit her family’s Pentecostal megachurch. She said her late grandmother arranged the marriage.

Gay was never one of the most dramatic 'housewives,' and she instead earned herself many fans (Rihanna included) by taking a more mediating role. She has, however, shared her criticisms of the Mormon church on the show.

While Gay does have a lot of fans, she had been partially vilified for having stood by Jen Shah during the investigation into her fraud charges. However, Gay said that was only because she thought Shah was innocent. Shah’s confession, said Gay, changed everything, and she now is on the side of the victims.