Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
A Memoir of Going Home
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Narrated by:
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Hillary Huber
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By:
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Rhoda Janzen
About this listen
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.
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Editorial reviews
This tartly told memoir with its tenderhearted core and luscious detailings of tangy borschts and double-decker Zwiebach buns slathered with homemade rhubarb jam is an honest, philosophical chronicle of poet and English professor Rhoda Janzen's return home at 43, to her Mennonite family, after being chewed up by a soap operatic sequence of very real personal calamities.
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress begins when Janzen's botched hysterectomy leaves her Velcro-strapping a urine collection bag to her thigh for six months. Just as she's snapped back from incontinence, Nick (her hunky, frequently drunk, charming, bipolar, and verbally abusive husband of 15 years) leaves her for Bob, a man he's met on Gay.com. That same week, a tipsy teen driver crashes Janzen's car on a snowy road. She ends up with two broken ribs and a fractured clavicle. "Under circumstances like these, what was�a gal to do?" she asks. "I'll tell you what I did. I went home to the Mennonites."
What transcends Mennonite in a Little Black Dress from a series of zany essays on "Menno" culture (a capella singalongs, raisins, and sweater vests) is Janzen's deeply nurtured respect for her community. She observes that, like the rest of us, Mennonites struggle with bratty children, substance abuse, dieting, and cheesy first dates an admission that opens up her quest to re-learn happiness into a universally felt exploration.
Janzen's spiritual leader turns out to be her sunny, irreverent mother, Mary, whose bouncy perceptions of sorrow, death, marriage between first cousins, and bodily functions she casually breaks wind at Kohl's while inspecting bundt pans end up revealing how intimately she grasps the true order of things. Hillary Huber is the narrator of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress and her droll, throaty voiceover perfectly pitches to Janzen's acerbic wit and academic background. A master quick-change artist, Huber so nimbly spins into bubbly, chattery Mary Janzen that when she conspiratorially shares, "A relaxed pothead sounds nice", about Rhoda's latest fling, it registers as mildly as "Please pass the Cotletten, dear." Nita Rao
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Perfect in every way!
- By Anonymous User on 10-19-22
By: Lincee Ray
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Shanda
- A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy
- By: Letty Cottin Pogrebin
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The word "shanda" is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense twentieth-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public humiliation either drove their aspirations or crushed their spirit. In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of members of her extended family.
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Beautifully Written!
- By Adele Aron Greenspun on 01-12-23
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Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?
- Confessions of a Gay Dad
- By: Dan Bucatinsky
- Narrated by: Dan Bucatinsky
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2005, Dan Bucatinsky and his partner, Don Roos, found themselves in an L.A. delivery room, decked out in disposable scrubs from shower cap to booties, to welcome their adopted baby girl - launching their frantic yet memorable adventures into fatherhood. Two and a half years later, the same birth mother - a heroically generous, pack-a-day teen with a passion for Bridezilla marathons and Mountain Dew - delivered a son into the couple’s arms.
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A Parenting Book with Humor and Heart
- By The Reading Date on 02-05-14
By: Dan Bucatinsky
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Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin
- A Memoir
- By: Nicole Hardy
- Narrated by: Nicole Hardy
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When Nicole Hardy’s eye-opening "Modern Love" column appeared in the New York Times, the response from readers was overwhelming. Hardy’s essay, which exposed the conflict between being true to herself as a woman and remaining true to her Mormon faith, struck a chord with women coast-to-coast. Now in her funny, intimate, and thoughtful memoir, Nicole Hardy explores how she came, at the age of 35, to a crossroads regarding her faith and her identity.
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This Book Spoke to Me
- By Allison on 04-08-14
By: Nicole Hardy
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It Happens Every Spring
- By: Catherine Palmer, Gary Chapman
- Narrated by: Jill Mueller
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The first in a new series, Four Seasons, takes us to Deepwater Cove, a small community on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, where we're introduced to four couples in different stages of life. It Happens Every Spring centers on Brenda, a lonely wife, and Steve, a go-getter real estate agent, in the mid-winter of their relationship. When a stranger appears at their door one night, change blows through their house and their marriage.
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Amazing book!
- By Rad on 10-07-22
By: Catherine Palmer, and others
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Mislaid
- A Novel
- By: Nell Zink
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start - she's a lesbian, he's gay - but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.
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Misbegotten, mishandled, misfired novel
- By Julie W. Capell on 02-07-16
By: Nell Zink
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The Very Worst Missionary
- A Memoir or Whatever
- By: Jamie Wright
- Narrated by: Madeleine Lambert
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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After finding Jesus at a suburban megachurch, young Jamie Wright trades in the easy life on the cul-de-sac for the green fields of Costa Rica. There, along with her husband, kids, and the family cat, she intends to serve God and make converts. But she soon loses faith and falls into a funk of cynicism and despair. Fortunately, Knives the cat is there, looking on with just enough disinterest to make her laugh...and dare her to try another way. That other way turns out to be telling the truth. She launches a renegade blog, Jamie the Very Worst Missionary, which wins a large following.
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Didn’t like the book
- By Jonathan on 04-17-20
By: Jamie Wright
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Laughing Without an Accent
- Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad
- By: Firoozeh Dumas
- Narrated by: Firoozeh Dumas
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In the best-selling memoir Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas recounted her adventures growing up Iranian American in Southern California. Now she again mines her rich Persian heritage in Laughing Without an Accent, sharing stories both tender and humorous on being a citizen of the world, on her well-meaning family, and on amusing cultural conundrums, all told with insights into the universality of the human condition. (Hint: It may have to do with brushing and flossing daily.)
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Sigh
- By Sara on 01-29-14
By: Firoozeh Dumas
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I Can't Complain
- (All Too) Personal Essays
- By: Elinor Lipman
- Narrated by: Elinor Lipman
- Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Elinor Lipman has populated her fictional universe with characters so utterly real that we feel like they're old friends. Now she shares an even more intimate world with us - her own - in essays that offer a candid, charming take on modern life. Looking back and forging ahead, she considers the subjects that matter most: childhood and condiments, long marriage and solo living, career and politics. Here you'll find the lighthearted: a celebration of four decades of All My Children, a reflection on being Jewish in heavily Irish-Catholic Lowell on St. Patrick's Day, a hilariously unflinching account of her tiptoe into online dating.
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Fabulous!
- By Louise on 09-15-19
By: Elinor Lipman
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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Too Close to the Falls
- A Memoir
- By: Catherine Gildiner
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the childhood of Catherine McClure Gildiner. It is the middle of the 1950s in Lewiston, New York, a small and sleepy American town very near Niagara Falls. No one is divorced. Mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon and children pop Pez candy and swing from vines over a local gorge. But at the tender age of four, it becomes clear to her Cathy's parents that their rambunctious daughter is no ordinary child and they soon put her "to work" at her father's pharmacy.
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Brilliant and funny and touching.
- By Kindle Customer on 11-07-19
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May We Be Forgiven
- By: A. M. Homes
- Narrated by: Andy Paris
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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May We Be Forgiven, a darkly comic novel of 21st-century domestic life, stars Harold Silver, a historian who's always been jealous of his successful brother, George. But when the hot-tempered George is institutionalized for committing a violent act, Harold finds himself comforting his brother's wife and children. What follows is a scathing examination of a family so fractured it may never be whole again.
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Give this one a try!
- By JWB on 02-13-13
By: A. M. Homes
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Isle of Palms
- A Lowcountry Tale, Book 3
- By: Dorothea Benton Frank
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Dorothea Benton Frank is a treasure of American letters with numerous New York Times best-sellers to her credit and a portfolio full of critical acclaim. “Mixing high drama and high jinks” ( Booklist), her third Lowcountry novel follows the fortunes of the dysfunctional Abbot family. Looking to set her life aright, Anna Lutz Abbot returns to her South Carolina lowcountry hometown. And as she attempts to right past wrongs, Anna receives help and support from a quirky cast of lovable locals sure to endear themselves to listeners.
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A feel good story
- By Sheryl on 02-04-13
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Liberating Paris
- A Novel
- By: Linda Bloodworth Thomason
- Narrated by: Cynthia Darlow
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Woodrow McIlmore, the town's golden boy and local gynecologist, is married to his beautiful high school sweetheart, Milan, and seems by all appearances to be leading the perfect life with his two children and extended family and friends. But when Wood's daughter announces that she is smitten with a college classmate and intends to marry him, her parents are stunned.
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Deeply moving, a great listen
- By Cynthia on 11-27-05
What listeners say about Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Dotty
- 01-05-10
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.
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12 people found this helpful
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- reader007
- 05-09-17
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.
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- Heather Turiello
- 10-12-13
Meh.
Any additional comments?
In a book that feels more like a compilation of essays, we learn about Rhoda's upbringing in a Mennonite family, her departure from the church and her relationship with an abusive, ego-centric man who leaves her for a gay man he meets online. There were stories in the book that had me laughing out loud, however, the story line is only meant as background...to allow her to move to another essay with a lesson to be learned. I found myself very frustrated, looking for the story itself. Janzen's prose is enjoyable even though the story is a bit discombobulated and unstructured.
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- Leigh Neves
- 03-07-24
The lack of a plot
I had to say it was probably one of the most boring stories I’ve heard
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- S. Phillips
- 09-17-12
Book is not great, narration makes it worse
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?
The most interesting part was the primer at the end about Mennonite culture - but this was much less a feature of the book than I had hoped it would be.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Hillary Huber?
Anyone with a little more emotion in their voice. Janzen's writing is filled with sarcasm, and yet the performance was flat. The narrator's voice really turned me off of this book; I found myself just waiting for it to end.
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- Carin
- 11-17-11
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.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Pamela Harvey
- 10-09-10
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.
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- Debbie Wasser
- 10-02-11
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.
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- Lisa
- 04-30-13
Couldn't finish it
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
Someone who appreciates sarcastic humor
Would you ever listen to anything by Rhoda Janzen again?
Maybe. I felt like her tone made it hard to feel sympathetic towards her--although it could have been the way it was read. Perhaps I would have felt differently if I was reading it myself. Because I didn't have sympathy for her--it just became a very boring listen.
How could the performance have been better?
It was read in a very sarcastic way. VERY off putting.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
A who cares exasperation.
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Overall
- Linda
- 11-06-10
Mennonite in a little black dress
II enjoyed this book. Ms Janzen enlightens regarding the life in a Mennonite family and most importantly
explains the decisions she has made regarding her faith and the resulting course her life, marriage and work.
I found the reader to present the literature in a dull and rather sarcastic way.
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