From the daily show to CNN, Joanna Brooks has become a go-to voice during our national inspection of Mormonism in this presidential campaign, and as Mitt Romney makes history, we revisit a personal and revealing conversation I had with Joanna Brooks last year.

She describes herself as unorthodox and passionately planted in this culture that is as much an identity as a faith.

Mormons across the spectrum, from secular to unorthodox to devout, reach out to her on her Twitter feed and blog, Ask Mormon Girl.

Through her life and voice, we experience the other end of American appraisals of the strangeness of Mormons.

See, for example, the pain and confusion for Mormon families contending with the history of polygamy.

Joanna Brooks opens a window on Mormonism as an evolving and far from monolithic faith.

This is a tradition that doesn't wash off. When you grew up Mormon, this is a huge part of your identity, and then you go through this very natural human process of maturation, of sorting out who you really are.

And there are so many people who are hungry to claim a place that they can feel good about in this rich, robust, imaginative, very powerful religious tradition, and they're starting to do it.

I'm Krista Tippett, and this is on Being from APM, American Public Media.

Joanna Brooks is a professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University.

But I've discovered and followed her as a journalist. Politico has named her one of 50 up-and-coming voices of savvy to watch.

I've been especially struck by sophisticated long-term reporting Joanna Brooks does on difficult issues.

And Ask Mormon Girl is a remarkably reflective community of dialogue and questioning where issues like family divisions over same-sex marriage are considered with an intelligence and compassion that allude the larger culture.

On her bio, Joanna Brooks notes that the Ask Mormon Girl blog is housed at the legendary Feminist Mormon Housewives blog.

And that's just one of the facets of this tradition which she knows and lives intimately, but which does not meet the traditional American eye on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

How would you start to talk about what it was like to grow up in a devout Mormon family? What would you describe?

Every time I tell the story of my Mormon upbringing, I feel a very strong sense of obligation to talk about my ancestors.

It's a very traditional Mormon way of telling the story. Do you want me to tell it that way? Yeah, absolutely.

My ancestors, my grandmothers, my mother's mother's side of the family were Mormon pioneers.

Some converted in England in the 1850s during a time of tremendous economic upheaval, depression, and boarded ships across the ocean, traveled to the Midwest, and then either pulled hand carts or went with ox carts across the plains to northern Utah and southern Idaho.

My father's side of the family converted in the 1930s. My father's mother was an okie who went to pick cotton in Arizona. His father was from a family of copper miners, and they found the church in Arizona where there's always been a large population of LDS people.

I was converted and everyone moved out to Los Angeles during the Depression. I was raised in an orange grove suburb of Los Angeles in a vibrant, very committed Mormon community.

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