It’s laugh-out-loud funny. It’s interesting. It’s crude.
It’s well-written. It’s an unbelievable story. So there are lots of reasons why
I should have loved this book.

But after about two chapters, I started skimming. In Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by
Rhoda Janzen, Janzen details her experience of going back home to live with her
Mennonite parents after her bipolar, bisexual husband leaves her for a man on
gay dot com. Oh, and all this after she gets in a terrible car accident and
breaks a lot of bones.

Interesting as the story may seem, nothing really happens in
this memoir. Lots of funny cracks about Mennonite culture. And some dear
memories and appreciation of it too. But not movement. She doesn’t really
change or grow. I guess there’s some personal healing, but that’s about it.

And then she punched me in the stomach. Before I go into
those details, let me explain that Rhoda Janzen is an English Professor and a
professional writer. Words matter to her. She knows their power. She chooses
them with care. Let me also point out that she is a highly educated, extremely
intelligent woman. And finally, let me point out that she is politically
correct about everything–tolerant of her husband’s lover, politically and
socially liberal.

Here’s the terrible part:

She writes, “I applied for seminary. You may be thinking, Are you profoundly retarded? Or, if you
are more tactful: Are you partially
retarded? But hey, I was in my twenties at the time…”

I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything so offensive and
insensitive in a memoir before. And I wish I could return her book to the
airport bookstore where I purchased it. I didn’t link to her book because I can’t recommend it. I can only lament that fact that a woman used her cultural power to malign people who are different from her.