What We're Reading: Rita

Mennonite In a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen

Things were going well for Rhoda Janzen until her early 40s (although not as well as they seemed to the outside world, as we find out later). Then, when she had barely recovered from complications from a hysterectomy, her husband of 15 years announced that he was leaving her for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com. Only days later, on a snowy road near her western Michigan home, a teenager in a Jeep slammed into her Beetle, leaving her with bruises, stitches, a broken clavicle and leg injuries so severe she couldn’t walk for weeks. So what does a 43-year old woman with this incredible run of bad luck do next? Well, if you’re Rhoda Janzen, you head back home to California to spend a few months of R&R with your parents. Only in this case, Dad is the retired head of the North American Mennonite Conference for Canada and the United States (“the Mennonite equivalent of the pope, but in plaid shorts and black dress socks”) and Mom, a retired nurse, is a deacon in the church, and the parental home is part of an extended Mennonite community. The author, who renounced her religion years before when she entered academia, was now back to her roots and forced to examine both her early life and the events that followed her departure from the community. She does so with affection and an enormous amount of humor, describing for readers what it was like growing up Mennonite in a secular world and introducing us to a religious community that will probably be unfamiliar to most. (She thoughtfully includes a brief introduction to all things Mennonite.) Janzen has been compared to Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris, and this is apparent in her hilarious descriptions of her family and friends and Mennonite food, dress, and customs. But she is also willing to share her recovery from the psychological damage done by her often abusive, bipolar ex-husband and she candidly examines the choices she made that led her to her present situation. Rhoda Janzen is one tough woman (which she would probably attribute to her upbringing), but she is also honest, fiercely intelligent, and screamingly funny.