Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home »

Rhoda Janzen holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was the University of California Poet Laureate in 1994 and 1997. She is the author of Babel's Stair, a collection of poems, and her poems have also appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Southern Review. She teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

It was not long after she turned 40 that Rhonda Janzen's husband left her for someone he met on Gay.com and she suffered a car accident that left her with serious injuries. To cope, Rhonda Janzen returned to where she never thought she would: the Mennonite home she left as a young woman.

Written with wry humor and huge personality—and tackling faith, love, family, and aging—Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is an immensely moving memoir of healing, certain to touch anyone who has ever had to look homeward in order to move ahead.

The New York Times - Kate Christensen

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is snort-up-your-coffee funny, breezy yet profound, and poetic without trying. In fact, the whole book reads as if Janzen had dictated it to her best non-Menno friend, in her bathrobe, over cups of tea…Her tone reminds me of Garrison Keillor's deadpan, affectionate, slightly hyperbolic stories about urbanites and Minnesota Lutherans, and also of the many Jewish writers who've brought mournful humor to the topics of gefilte fish and their own mothers, as well as to the secular, often urban, often intellectual world they call home now. It's the narrative voice of the person who grew up in an ethnic religious community, escaped it, then looked back with clearsighted objectivity and appreciation.

1 The Bridegroom Cousin 9

2 Touch My Tooth 39

3 Fear of Mosquitoes 61

4 Wounding Words 86

5 A Lingering Finish 107

6 What the Soldier Made 139

7 The Big Job 157

8 Rippling Water 171

9 Wild Thing 193

10 The Trump Shall Sound 209

11 And That's Okay! 232

12 The Raisin Bombshell 259

13 The Therapeutic Value of Lavender 271

Appendix: A Mennonite History Primer 295

Acknowledgments 316