Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

Rhoda Janzen, a 43-year-old English professor and poet, recounts how her life collapsed in rapid succession. Her husband of 15 years, Nick, left her for a man named Bob whom he met on Gay.com. The same week, a 19-year-old driver crashed into her car, leaving her with multiple broken bones and a severe concussion. Broke and broken, Rhoda went home to the conservative Mennonite community in California where she grew up but had not spent extended time in 25 years. The memoir chronicles this return, weaving Rhoda's experiences among the Mennonites with reflections on her childhood, her troubled marriage, and her slow recovery.

Rhoda introduces her family with comic affection. Her father, Si, once headed the North American Mennonite Conference, the denomination's highest leadership position. He was tall, handsome, gravely frugal, and given to summoning his wife to view e-cards on his computer. Her mother, Mary, was a retired nurse whose relentless cheerfulness defined her character. Rhoda's sister, Hannah, was her closest confidante. Her brothers, Aaron and Caleb, remained within the Mennonite fold, and their reunions with Rhoda were marked by unspoken disapproval.

Before Nick left, Rhoda had already endured a medical crisis. At 42, she underwent a radical hysterectomy during which her doctor accidentally punctured two organs, leaving her incontinent and connected to a urine bag for months. Nick proved a surprisingly competent caretaker, though Rhoda later reinterpreted his attentiveness as guilt. Her best friend, Lola, an American living in Italy, flew in to help. Rhoda eventually made a full recovery, only to face the far worse blow when Nick left.

The memoir's emotional core is Rhoda's reckoning with her marriage. She met Nick in a university library and was drawn to his intelligence, style, and intensity. Nick, enrolled in a graduate program in political theory, had bipolar disorder and refused medication, arguing that bipolarity made him smarter and more creative. Over the years, his moods cycled through manic spending, heavy drinking, destroyed furniture, and verbal cruelty. Rhoda lists his most cutting insults: that she lacked insight, creativity, and taste; that she was fat; that her parents' love was toxic religious judgment.

During a particularly dark period in Chicago in 1996, Rhoda hit rock bottom and called Hannah for help. Hannah's husband, Phil, flew to Chicago, packed Rhoda's belongings, and drove her and her cat across the country without probing questions. Yet the marriage persisted: The couple reunited, split, reunited, divorced, and remarried before Nick finally left for Bob. Rhoda explains her inability to leave by pointing to her Mennonite upbringing, a culture that trained girls never to challenge authority. Having grown up where divorce seemed as foreign as rock and roll, leaving simply never occurred to her.

Back among the Mennonites, Rhoda found herself in a world both familiar and strange. At a chaotic Christmas Eve dinner at Aaron's house, her sister-in-law Staci, married to Caleb, fired blunt questions about Rhoda's finances and divorce. On a road trip to visit Hannah in Bend, Oregon, Rhoda's father insisted on McDonald's and prayed aloud at length over a Denny's patty melt, thanking God for the meal, their pastor, the governor, and the people of Iraq.

Throughout the memoir, Rhoda revisits the textures of her Mennonite childhood. She and Hannah compiled a ranked list of the most embarrassing foods their mother packed in their school lunches, from hot potato salad to the dreaded Borscht, a cabbage-and-beet soup whose smell could clear a room. She recounts her lifelong desire to dance, thwarted by Mennonite prohibition, and her mother's letter forbidding participation in an eighth-grade talent show.

Rhoda catalogs her reasons for leaving the Mennonite church: the community's resistance to female leadership, its position on homosexuality, its narrow definition of salvation that excluded all non-Christians, and the suspicion of higher education captured in a Low German proverb that the more educated a person is, the more warped. Yet the memoir also traces generational change. At a dance recital, Rhoda watched her brother Aaron sit motionless as his 14-year-old daughter, Phoebe, was lifted by a male partner. Aaron, who had probably never danced himself, had gone without a second car so Phoebe could train daily.

Rhoda's recovery unfolded in fits and starts. She structures it as a wry 12-step program, beginning with the discovery that she could not leave an olive oil bottle sideways on the counter, revealing how deeply she had accommodated Nick's need for control. Following a feng shui book, she wrote affirmations on construction paper, burned Nick's letters, and had a family photograph framed: her mother and six sisters in identical Mennonite blouses, her mother distinguished by a tiny white bow in her hair. Lola sustained her with daily emails from Bologna, and local friends left homemade soups and candles in her office mailbox.

Nick's financial reliability became a test of faith. A court order required him to continue payments, but he threatened to stop. Lola persuaded Rhoda to write affirmations on index cards and stack them in her feng shui prosperity area. Each month, the deposit appeared. When Nick subpoenaed Rhoda to challenge the order, the judge dismissed his case in under a minute. Rhoda's attorney instructed her to hide in the women's restroom. Sitting in a locked stall, Rhoda saw graffiti celebrating someone named Patty Lee and clung to the image of Patty Lee's tenacity.

The memoir also grapples with compassion. Rhoda recounts the story of Nick's brother Flip, who died by suicide at 42. Nick's parents refused to attend the funeral, declaring that suicides go to hell. Rhoda was horrified, and the experience deepened her conviction that virtue is not a fixed condition of character but an elected action, a choice made repeatedly until it becomes habit. She resolves not to become a bitter divorcée, acknowledging that Nick loved her as much as he was able.

Rhoda's romantic life resumed in unlikely forms. She met a muscular rocker named Mitch who wore a replica crucifixion nail around his neck. Mitch attended a church called Faith Now with a support ministry called the Affliction Ministry Team. A 90-year-old Mennonite woman later set Rhoda up with her grandson Soren Friesen, a 27-year-old with a master's degree in screenwriting. To Rhoda's surprise, Soren was tall, funny, and attractive. They bonded over shared memories of the Mennonite Children's Choir, and he took her on a motorcycle ride at 100 miles per hour.

In her final weeks in California, Rhoda deepened a friendship with Eva Wiebe-Martens, a childhood acquaintance who chaired the religion department at the local Mennonite university. Eva represented the life Rhoda might have chosen: seminary, theology, a husband, two children, and deep roots in the community. Their conversations became more sustaining than any romantic prospect.

The memoir closes on a day trip with the Mennonite Senior Professionals to valley farms. At an herb farm, elderly Mennonites were handed rhythm instruments and led in a folksy song. Rhoda's mother shook a tambourine; retired organist Herman Froese stomped his foot. The scent of lavender triggered a childhood memory: a pale blue silk hosiery envelope Rhoda received as a Sunday-school prize, filled with a handkerchief dusted with lavender talc. Shaking her bells among the singing elders, Rhoda felt she had drifted back to this point of origin after her turbulent marriage. The harmony rose in the cool afternoon, and the music felt like a hand on the small of her back, nudging her forward: the sound of her heritage, her future.