SEARSPORT — Local businesses Hey Sailor! and Anodyne Book Shop combine to host Maine author Chris Davis for a book signing, selection reading, and question and answer session Friday, Feb. 16, at 6 p.m., at Hey Sailor’s Starboard Lounge, 27 East Main Street.

The event is open to the public. Purchase a book to be signed and stay afterward for dinner, drinks, dessert, and dancing.

Davis is the author of Worthy: The Memoir of an Ex-Mormon Lesbian, which details her memories as a child growing up in a devout Mormon household in Bangor in the eighties.

In a news release, Davis says of her experience, “I was a faithful member of the church my whole life, serving as a full-time missionary, getting married in the temple, meeting all the expected milestones of a Mormon wife and mother. But everything changed when my 15-year-old came out as non-binary. I was a closeted lesbian and could endure the rhetoric about queer people being sinners, but once the church started aiming that harmful talk at my kid, I had to stand up for them; for us.”

For more information, visit http://www.chrisdavisproud.com.  

Chris Davis was a lifelong devout Mormon who checked all the expected boxes of wife, mother, teacher, leader, follower, and believer until 2020 when she left her family and her church to fulfill her own personal destiny as a gay woman and independent thinker. She lives quite happily in her home state of Maine.  

More about Chris Davis:

Chris Davis was a lifelong devout Mormon who checked all the expected boxes of wife, mother, teacher, leader, follower, and believer until 2020 when she left her family and her church to fulfill her own personal destiny as a gay woman and independent thinker. She remains close with her two adult children, one of whom is a believing member of the church and the other who is a transgender man who has also left the church.

Davis’s other works include an essay about her experience of being queer in the LDS church in an anthology called I Spoke to You with Silence, published in 2022 by the University of Utah Press, and a short story titled Follow the River Home in Rivers of Ink: Literary Reflections on the Penobscot, published in 2023 by 12 Willows Press.

She lives quite happily in her home state of Maine.