Secret Ceremonies is the story of the awakening of Deborah Laake. A devout Mormon, she attended Brigham Young University, received good grades, was popular �?? but most of all, she found the One, the man who declared that his claim to her was a matter of divine revelation. Thus, while still in her teens she was married in the sacred chambers of a Mormon temple. From there her life began to disintegrate. Divorced by age twenty from a man she never loved, barred from the Mormon temple and threatened with excommunication, she found her depression deepening. Still trying to live up to the church's expectations, she married again, unaware that the resulting mental illness would propel her into a hospital ward of unabashed psychotics. It was there, among the truly unconventional, she somehow recognized a modern world beckoning to her from beyond the closed patriarchal society that had always sheltered her yet kept her from true maturity.… (more)