The Church chooses where they’re sent, with no input from the missionary or his family. Who knew? (I did, that’s for damned sure.) All I know is that, as I read, I found myself wishing I’d seduced some Mormon missionaries in my younger days.įor those who don’t know, every 19-year-old young man in Mormonism is pretty much forced to leave school and go on a two-year mission. Religious insanity, it turns out, is alarmingly similar among both orthodox and heterodox sects. And like Laake’s book, I could relate strongly to much of The Accidental Terrorist, even though my family had only been Mormon for a few months. I’m not going to spoil the climax of this page-turner, but I will say that it’s the perfect “companion” (see what I did there?) to Deborah Laake’s terrific Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman’s Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond, which I’d read some time ago during my own deconversion from Christianity. Luckily for us, he self-published the memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, and it’s simply fabulous. He explained that publishers seemed reluctant to put out the memoir he’d written about it because of the “T” word, which I could totally believe. As we savored the cocktails and curries of Rasika, Bill relayed his experience as a Mormon missionary and how it led to him accidentally committing a terrorist act in order to keep one of his fellow missionaries - sometimes known as a “companion” - from fleeing his two-year mission.

when I had dinner with him, his agent Barry Goldblatt and my friend Scott Edelman. I first met Bill Shunn last year at World Fantasy 2014 in Washington D.C.

Deborah laake