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

If you ever get the chance to hear Rhoda Janzen speak, cancel your other plans and get yourself there! I took a workshop of hers at the Festival of Faith and Writing on the essentially Christian nature of memoir writing, an enterprise she cast as crafting narratives of captivity, release and restoration. It was my favorite hour of the conference. Ms. Janzen was funny, self-deprecating, generous, insightful and thoughtful.

I was disappointed not to find the same author in this book. The author's focus on humor is so pervasive, so biting, that it overshadows everything else. And much of the humor I found to be overreaching and aimed at the lowest readership, overly focused on sexual themes and downright smutty at points. I got the same feeling from this memoir that I did from Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, that the author is working hard to tell a good story, but at the cost of any real emotional involvement.

In her workshop, she gave advice to a questioner asking how honest you can be in a memoir, to what length you can go without hurting family and friends. Ms. Janzen advised giving the manuscript to the two people whose relationship you most value and to make any changes they suggest. I was left wondering who reviewed her manuscript. Her depictions of family and friends come across as benign on the surface, but underneath run currents of malice that stem from feelings of superiority. I recognize the pattern, as I dated (but fortunately didn't marry) a person with the same trait. While in her lecture she expressed gratitude for the richness imparted by her Mennonite upbringing, here I felt only a meanness toward the religious community of her youth.

Ms. Janzen's life has had its share of heartbreak -- her 15-year marriage to an abusive man, his decision to leave her for a man he meets on a gay Internet site, a car wreak that debilitates her physically, a financial crisis brought on by the divorce -- but I wasn't moved to tears with her as I would have liked to be. Because of that, I just couldn't laugh with her either.Get more detail about Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home.