Virginity and the city

If I told you that Elna Baker had written a frank and self-deprecating memoir about dating, which is unlike any other frank and self-deprecating memoir about dating, you probably would not believe me.

However, Baker is a Mormon. A peachy, astute, witty 27-year-old Mormon who has never had sex. The book - The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance - is all about what it's like to live in Manhattan when the list of things you can't do (cigarettes, wine, coffee, drugs, swearing, sex outside marriage, marriage to someone who isn't Mormon) seems far more seductive than the things you can (studying scripture, prayer) and where the majority of your contemporaries think you might be - in Baker's words - "a whack job".

Until now her faith is something she has avoided talking about when she first meets someone ("you know how in films people spit out their drinks when they're surprised and you think that never happens in real life? It does").

I imagine the pitch to the publishers must have been tough to pull off - "how about a book featuring a wise-cracking virginal Mormon, a sort of Candace Bushnell meets, erm, the total opposite of Candace Bushnell?" It shouldn't work, but it does.

Something to do with the fact that Baker, who also has a stand-up comedy act, is an original voice who writes with an honesty both funny and thought-provoking, about whether to remain a good Mormon and risk ending her days a lonely, frustrated virgin - the number of single Mormons in New York is a paltry 800 - or abandoning her faith for the sake of something most of us get out of the way by the time we're 17. There is a genuine dilemma here that is, unlike a memoir about giving up sex for a year just for the hell of it, oddly moving.

Not least because there is a very strong likelihood that her honesty will appal her devout parents, whom she loves, and have her thrown out of the church to which she's belonged all her life. Mormon message boards in America are already split: some thrilled that finally here's a Mormon that they - and the rest of America - can relate to; others warning that she should beware the wrath of her bishop. "Fifty per cent will really appreciate that there's an honest voice out there," she says. "The other 50 per cent from more conservative backgrounds will feel upset and angry that I am trying to represent them.

Unfortunately they're the type who get their rifles out." Baker is the first Mormon I've ever knowingly met and is full of surprises, the first being that she suggests we meet in a coffee shop (isn't that a bit like meeting Paul McCartney at the butcher's? Not really. She orders an orange juice).

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of those religions we know bizarrely little about. "People don't get Mormons," she says. There are an awful lot of myths about them. The biggest is that they all live in Utah and they're all polygamists (there are a few, but the Mormon church opposes the practice).

What does have some veracity to it - although even she hasn't seen them yet because she is not married - are the special garments that every married Mormon must wear and which reach up to the neck and down to the thighs and would preclude wearing anything that might show off a bosom. "Goodbye cleavage," she says, which would be a shame because Baker recently had breast implants.

"As a Mormon I always thought the first man to see me naked would be my husband, not my plastic surgeon." In the book she explains how she used to be vastly overweight. A three-month crash diet, a course of possibly illegal slimming pills and one bout of plastic surgery later, she is gorgeous, with strawberry-blond hair and fabulous skin. Accordingly, she has no shortage of male admirers.

However, due to the paucity of fanciable Mormon men on the whole, she dates non-Mormons with the caveat that the relationships don't last because she won't sleep with them. So what's a typical Mormon chap like? "It depends where you're living," she replies.

"In Utah most Mormon men get married straight after their mission at 21. As a result, if you're not living in Utah and not living with that pool of guys ... Let's just say it takes a particular type of man to avoid marriage when you have a whole community pushing you to do it." Most of the options are either divorced or gay men not yet out of the closet.

Every year in New York there is a dance for single Mormons (hence the title of the book). "A whole room of men who have not had sex can be awkward," she muses. "I am used to dating non-Mormon men who are at ease with themselves." She realised she had been brought up differently to most other people when her parents moved, with their five children, from Seattle to Spain when Baker was 9.

Every day would begin with Bible practice. There were lessons in sewing and chastity. Magazines were banned, as were swear words. Sex was never discussed. "Part of the reason I never had sex was because I had no idea how to." There is no happy ending.

As the book draws to a close, Baker is in love with an atheist her conscience won't allow her to sleep with; bewildered by the idea that she might have to begin a life without her faith. By the time you read this, Baker may no longer be a Mormon and may have been thrown out of the church.

It's possible she's trying to force the issue, although I suspect that she wrote the book in an insular bubble and did not think about the consequences - especially with the pressure of a publisher urging her to be as honest as possible. "There is a sense now that I can't go back," she says. There is an irony here.

Being Mormon is her selling point: the book has already had interest from Hollywood, her comedy act is inspired by her Mormon upbringing and when a news story about Mormons breaks she's called up for a quote by the television networks. Some might argue that she's doing her religion a favour by spreading the word that Mormons can laugh at themselves.

At the same time, falling in love and marrying another Mormon seems horribly unlikely in this day and age. Can't you just be a bad Mormon instead? I wonder. "Be a pretend Mormon?" she says. "It's kind of hard to do."

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance
by Elna Baker (Dutton Books, $39) is out now.

- OBSERVER