Review
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Title: Saving Alex – When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That’s When My Nightmare Began
Author: Alex Cooper with Joanna Brooks
Publisher: HarperCollins
Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 248
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-06-237460-8
Price: $24.99
Reviewed by Catherine C. Peterson for the Association for Mormon Letters
The story line in this autobiographical book, “Saving Alex,” would make a great soap opera. Alex, the fifteen-year-old heroine, tries to “find” herself, and just when she thinks she does, she falls victim to evils in the world and an ill-fated affair of the heart. Her concerned parents attempt to save her by sending her away to a place they believe can reform her. Little do they know they are sending her into slavery conditions where she is isolated from communicating with others, stripped of her belongings, forced to cook, clean, and is subjected to demeaning verbal and physical abuse. She escapes by running away barefoot in the middle of the night, hoping only to be reunited with her real family. She finds someone to help her.
“Saving Alex” is the story of an adolescent girl whose behavior befuddled and bedeviled her parents to the point that they ignorantly send her to a group home in St. George, Utah, for treatment to straighten her out. From her teenage point of view the whole ordeal was to change her propensity for “liking girls.” How much of it had to do with her running away without telling her parents where she was, lying to them, smoking pot, and disregarding her church’s and parents’ teachings, we cannot know, because the parents’ point of view was not included in the narrative. Ignorantly her parents send her to a family home reputed to help rebellious and confused kids.
The home’s environment was far from the stalwart Mormon home Alex left. The Mormon family she stayed with had the outward appearance of acceptability and social standing, went to church, read scriptures, and prayed. Her treatment in this home was far from curative or palliative. They used scurrilous methods to psychologically break her down by depriving her of things that were of comfort and support to her. They took her clothes and personal items, including her cello, and dressed her in sloppy looking second-hand clothing. They made her cook for a household of seven people. They did not allow her to talk to the children or the other teens that were in treatment. For months she was kept away from school and had little intellectual stimulation. She was subjected to physical and verbal abuse. She was threatened and demeaned.
The house parents were self-deluded, rationalizing that their retraining methods were proven, and a paycheck was incentive for them to keep Alex there. Alex valiantly protected the 18 year old girl she was in love with by refusing to reveal her name and contact information, but finally relented after being forced to hold a backpack full of heavy rocks, standing with her face to a wall for hours and days on end. She yearned to return home to her family, and asserted her parents would never have sent her there if they had understanding of the type of abuse she suffered for eight long months. After a couple of unsuccessful escape attempts, she finally fled in the darkness of the early morning hours and found her way to the high school where a teacher protected her and helped her.
The end of the book follows Alex through a maze of social services and a court case where finally it is declared that she has the legal right to date girls. Some readers may be uncomfortable with what may seem to be advocacy for the homosexual lifestyle, but the power of Alex’s story is not in her gay salvation, but in her strength and stamina in adversity, and the resolution wherein she finds peace with her parents. At the end of the book she acknowledges, “I want to thank…finally, my parents – I am so grateful we have come to the point where I can share my life with you and you are supportive.” Whether Alex is saved, I cannot say because the book raises deeper questions that need answering – What or whom was she saved from? Who did the saving? Who put her in peril in the first place? What motivated the people in the book to behave as they did? This was a simple book on the face of it, but there were many layers and themes embedded in the story, worth discussion.