 In May 1946, the LDS Church excommunicated Brodie. She never tried to regain her membership. Brodie once wrote to a friend that what she suffered from her disillusionment with Mormonism "had to do with the pain I caused my family. The disillusionment itself was ... a liberating experience." Before No Man Knows My History was published, Brodie sought to comfort her parents, "You brought us all up to revere the truth, which is the noblest ideal a parent can instill in his children, and the fact that we come out on somewhat different roads certainly is no reflection on you." Brodie's mother and three sisters were enthusiastic about the book, but Thomas McKay refused to read it.
