Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

A Memoir of Going Home

By: Rhonda Janzen

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

A hilarious and moving memoir in the spirit of Anne Lamott and Nora Ephron about a woman who returns home to her Mennonite family after a personal crisis.

The same week her husband of 15 years ditches her for a guy he met on Gay.com, a partially inebriated teenage driver smacks her VW Beetle head-on. Marriage over, body bruised, life upside-down, Rhoda does what any sensible 43-year-old would do: She goes home.

But hers is not just any home. It's a Mennonite home, the scene of her painfully uncool childhood and the bosom of her family: handsome but grouchy Dad, plain but cheerful Mom. Drinking, smoking, and slumber parties are nixed; potlucks, prune soup, and public prayer are embraced. Having long ago left the faith behind, Rhoda is surprised when the conservative community welcomes her back with open arms and offbeat advice. She discovers that this safe, sheltered world is the perfect place to come to terms with her failed marriage and the choices that both freed and entrapped her.

©2009 Rhoda Janzen (P)2009 Highbridge

It's OK

As a Mennonite in the Fresno area, I hardly recognized my community in this book. I'm 25 years older than the author (whose family I know) and didn't suffer the deprivations she describes. There's a whole lot of literary license going on here. So I say, go ahead, listen to the book and enjoy it, but keep that grain of salt firmly in place.

A bigger disappointment for me was the mispronunciation of so very many words by the reader. I was under the impression that readers or producers checked with the author re pronunciations. Guess I was wrong.

Not for me

The narrators voice was difficult to listen to for so long. The story shallow. There were funny lines. Overall I found it boring.

Laughing through tears.

Boy, Rhoda Janzen has bad luck. The schadenfreude alone would be reason to read this memoir, but luckily she also has a sense of humor and a way with words. I hope I'm not giving away too much but you have to or else there's no plot summary at all. Rhoda grew up Mennonite but as an adult, she strayed far afield, becoming a college professor (Mennonites do not approve of higher education), marrying an atheist, not having children. Then she has a medical issue, and the procedure does not go well. To her surprise, her husband is great at nursing her back to health. Then he leaves her for a guy named Bob that he met online. A week later, Rhoda is in a terrible car accident. Unable to really get around (and unable to afford her house payments alone), she moves back in with her parents, temporarily. Which means she becomes reimmersed in Mennonite culture.

Most of us are probably pretty unfamiliar with the Mennonites. They are not the Amish - in fact the Amish split with them centuries ago because the Mennonites were so liberal - but liberal is not a word anyone would use to describe them. Rhoda's church had an outhouse. Her mother had grown up wearing clothes made from flour sacks. Rhoda and her first boyfriend in high school dated for a year without even French kissing - because they had no idea it existed. As someone who has lived fully in the secular world for over 20 years, she is the perfect person to introduce us to Mennonite culture. Also it's refreshing that she didn't have any great falling out with the religion herself - it's just not for her, but she respects her parents' beliefs and still likes the food and hymns.

Throughout the narrative, as small incidents of everyday life are conveyed, Rhoda is healing both physically, and emotionally. We get details of her tumultuous life with her artistic, bipolar husband. Returning home was obviously soothing to her soul as well as her body. And her mother is hilarious. Hilary Huber does a good job is giving the different characters different voices (although all fairly nasal though that's not her normal voice), but Rhoda's mother's voice is the best. The slightly childish aspect of the tone matches up perfectly to her upbeat, effervescent personality.

There is an explanation of the Mennonites at the end of the book.

Enjoyable but the ending was too transparent...

As Rhoda's saga comes to a close, she hooks up with another Mennonite 17 years younger than she. The guy just happens to be well-educated, well-employed (so she wouldn't have to be a farm wife, or any kind of wife at all, and wouldn't have to sell her deluxe house by the lake) and in a field close to the author's - i.e. a socially acceptable Mennonite, not one of the "uncool" Mennonites of her childhood and teenage years. It's no coincidence that she goes on a "magical mystery tour" at the end of the story to rediscover her heritage right after this attraction begins. I wanted to see Rhoda evolve past her personal baggage of a restricting and oppressing religion and open up more to life. Instead, because of a lustful liaison with a co-Mennonite, she goes back into her past and wants to re-immerse.

There were funny parts to this novel, but I was way more interested in the conflicts of Rhoda's life with the gay husband and the issues of their separation, than I was with the Mennonite thing. The narrator did a great job, with just the right ironic tone. No sense of being too old, too young, nor any identifiable accent. I was only able to listen to this book because of the narrator, and unfortunately I have to reject many audible books because the narrator is too old, too male (sorry, guys), or reads with too much of an accent.

Less than expected

I was hoping to learn a little about the Mennonite community, why the author left and why she returned. Although occasionally amusing, this memoire contained mostly silly, child-like (bathroom) humor, and offered very little in the way of insight into its author's psyche or background. Although the family and culture was religious, it was not different from many other families whose constraints cause some children to rebel and others to embrace its values.