Kitten Memoir Series

Laurel Shea is a therapist, writer, and speaker exploring religion, sexuality, body image, and autonomy. Previously known and publicly recognized as Lolly Weed, Laurel continues to share her evolving story of identity, deconstruction, and reclamation.

Through personal narrative, the Kitten Memoir Series examines purity culture, sexual shame, body image, faith transition, and the quiet choices that shaped her life.

This series traces her evolution of being raised in devout Mormon culture, trying to do everything “right”, marrying a gay man, and eventually finding herself untethered from her own voice and desires.

This intimate first installment launches a series that moves through innocence, sexuality, queerness, heartbreak, anger, and reclamation.

Future installments include:

Good Kitten

Rainbow Kitten

Unrequited Kitten

Exposed Kitten

Rage Kitten

Repressed Kitten

Book One | A Short Memoir

On the way home from a family vacation, Lolly’s gay husband, Josh, asks a question she never wanted to consider; would it be okay if they never had sex again?

Lolly and Josh are faithful and devout Mormons who did everything “right.” They waited. They prayed. They followed every rule about chastity. And even though Josh is gay, they made efforts to have sex regularly for the first twelve years of marriage. But things have changed recently.

In Repressed Kitten, Lolly struggles to buy a vibrator in order to survive her future in a sexless marriage. This purchase brings up its own challenges, as it stirs up past memories and the shame of still wanting something she can’t have.

Blending raw personal narrative with the stories of other religious couples who waited for marriage, Repressed Kitten explores the disorienting leap from abstinence to assumed sexual expectations, the silence around consent in purity culture, the shame that follows both desire and pornography, and the confusion that can bloom inside “righteous” marriages.

Repressed Kitten is the short story that opens the installment of the Kitten Memoir Series.

Good Kitten

Good Kitten, the second book in the Kitten Memoir Series, follows the experiences of the author in her younger years as she tries to make sense of religion, the mechanics of sex, and the rules of chastity; all of which form an uncomfortable backdrop as she discovers her own yearnings.

Growing up in a religion where goodness is measured in modesty and obedience, she absorbs the belief that her body is under constant judgement. God determines the rules of conduct for her body, while men and boys judge its appearance. Can she meet both the standards of God and men? Either way, her body is not her own.