Home Again...

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. ~ Maya Angelou


One of my sisters, before my book came out, said that she thought I would just be in my element when I got up to talk in front of an audience. I agreed with her then, and now that I've been in front of 24 audiences, I still agree with her. This past week David and I went on a nine-day tour in which I gave eight talks in eight days. This was the most intense stint of talks yet. I talked in front of 319 people collectively, with my smallest audience yet being 17 people, and my largest one this week being 67. I still like conducting talks, especially the question and answer period, when I get to discover what is on the minds of the audience members. 


I love doing book tours, but I am also very happy to be home. David and I have unpacked our bags and are taking a deep breath. It feels so good! Now we can get back into the daily routine of taking bike rides together, and keeping up the house and yard, besides making as much progress on the second book as possible. People we have read the first book are clamoring for the second, so it is inspiring to know we have an audience waiting with anticipation.


Several of you commented or left questions on my last posting. Thank you. Erik, you left several, which I want to address:


Saloma, hope you have/had a great trip. I'm really impressed by your energy level to have so many events scheduled in such a short time! I would think that reflects your passion for your topic and book. I'm sure it will go/went great.

My topic(s), I guess for when you return, and of course if you feel like answering:

What was the "toughest" question you got from your audiences?

What do you think are the most common misconceptions people have about the Amish? And the most bizarre?


Hmmm, the toughest question I've gotten?  That itself is a tough question. There is a set of questions that have to do with why the Amish don't allow their children to go beyond the eighth grade, why my home community did not allow bicycles, or why the Amish are allowed to ride in cars, but not own them. In one case an earnest young girl of about nine asked me "Well, why didn't the Amish allow Christmas trees?" These questions are tough in the sense that I never knew the answer to them myself, so I don't feel I can answer them properly. But in exploring the one about limiting education, I discovered something I had never thought of before -- this is not actually a "rule" in the Amish community, in the sense that the bishop of each district will include it during Ordnungs Church twice a year when he reviews the rules of the church (details about how women should dress, how they should dress their children, how men should dress, which forms of technology are not acceptable, etc). Education is not even discussed, because it is just a given that children will not continue school beyond the acceptable age (in my home community it was the eighth grade).  Because it is such a given, it has become a tradition that people don't even think of challenging. 


In nearly every audience, someone has asked me what my spiritual beliefs/affiliations are now. This I find particularly tough, partly because I am usually rather private about my spiritual beliefs. It is one of the things I agree with the Amish about -- that my deepest beliefs are not that easy to articulate, and even if I could, I may not want to. Like the Amish, I feel that to talk about them reduces their power and authenticity. 


I would say the most common misconception is the notion that young people during their rumspringa years, get to go out and taste of the world, and get a conscious choice about  whether to stay or leave. I've addressed this issue several times over here on my blog: To Leave or not to Leave, That Sticky Wicket, and Rumspringa Revisited. 


Perhaps the most bizarre misconception? I would have to say it's the one that the lifestyle depicted in Amish fiction is actually what it's like to grow up Amish. Very few Amish fiction authors grew up Amish. Nearly anyone who did grow up Amish will agree that there are some things you just don't "get" if you were not -- you have to be there, or have been there.


Erik, thank you for your thought-provoking questions. 

My talk at the Lancaster Public Library

There were 54 people in the audience -- the librarian said this was double how many people showed up for Beverly Lewis. Ira Wagler was there, which was the first time I'd met him. His memoir "Growing up Amish" is coming out on July 1. 

A Pause

I am going to be quite busy for the next ten days, so I will not be posting to my blog for a little while. I have eight book talks scheduled in as many days, so life is a bit hectic for David and me. I will return to blogging just as soon as I can.

I want to thank everyone who responded to my last blog posting about my mother. There were several thoughtful and heartfelt responses that I really resonated with -- the kind of responses that keep me interested in blogging, even when my life is full to overflowing.

If you feel like it, please leave me suggestions of topics you would like for me to address when I return. I find the questions and answers at my book talks are very dynamic. I love to respond directly to what my audience is interested in. I also enjoyed the questions many of you posed before, which is a virtual Q&A. 

Thank you, as always for following my posts. For those of you who have blogs, I promise to get back to reading yours when life calms down a bit.

I'll leave you with my latest favorite quote:

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. ~ Anne Bradstreet            

Remembering Mem

For some reason I've been thinking of my mother, who we called Mem. It is customary to celebrate Mother's Day in May, but for me this has become "reMEMbering month."

Mem with our son, Tim. This is the only photo Mem ever posed for us.

Often when someone dies, we have a way of "purifying" our memories of that person. When my feelings of missing Mem were their keenest, I did dwell on my good memories of her, and not on the ones that complicated my view of her. However, now that several years have gone by since she died, I keep trying to understand her and I find that my feelings for Mem are as complex as she was. She had two contradicting sides to her — she could be soft, understanding, and nurturing or she could be harsh and cruel with her whip or leather belt; she could be brutally honest or she could be evasive of the truth; she could sometimes espouse to the Amish values and question them at other times; she could support me in my endeavors and my freedom from the Amish set of restrictions, while eliciting sympathy from the Amish that I had left; and she could play the martyr that she was in such an unhappy marriage, yet be the lonely widow once Datt died.


One of the things Mem was good at was to elicit feelings of sympathy, especially when she cried. I used to feel so guilty and horrible when I made her cry. When I left the Amish the first time, I could not think about how sad she must be, or else I would have gone back out of guilt. Just before Mem died, she was still saying, "You girls all rejected me." I was talking to her on the phone during the hospital stay that would lead the doctors to conclude that there was nothing else they could do for her, and she was sent home. I tried to tell her that we sisters had all decided as adults to leave the community, but it had nothing to do with rejecting her. By the silence at the other end, I could tell Mem was not convinced. I changed the subject.


When Mem first found out that I was writing for publication, she wrote this to me in a letter: “Let me give you some advice: you should write only good things about the Amish, and then your books will sell better.” Mem was right -- at least if I go by all the romantic versions of Amish life depicted in “bonnet fiction.” But that would not have been telling my truth. Recently I read something in Poets and Writers magazine that really resonated with me. Poet Nikky Finney describes how her grandmother made a stunning, fervent request after reading one of Finney’s books — she asked that it be her last. Finney wrote: “I would’ve promised to sail the seven seas in five days if I could have, for my grandmother. She meant that much to me. ‘Promise’ she said. But I couldn’t. Even for her, I couldn’t.”  

Perhaps the time we feel the most vulnerable to our loved ones' wishes is when we know that they are dying. And so it was for me when Mem, on a day that she had truly lost her dignity — she had no hair from chemotherapy, and even the scarf she tried to wear on her head for a covering kept slipping off; she couldn’t wear her teeth; and she was eating ham without a knife or fork — literally taking a big piece of ham between her fingers and thumb and gumming it. It was in this pathetic situation that she asked me “to not publish anything bad about Joe or me.” I couldn’t promise Mem any more than Finney could promise her grandmother.

I’ve been asked whether I have forgiven Mem and Joe, to which I answer that it is something I still struggle with. I suppose it depends on one’s definition of forgiveness. Then I read something else from Nikky Finney that spoke to me when she wrote: “I too forgive, but I don’t forget. In the forgetting we miss something important about the climb, the loss of life, the loss of dreams. My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away.”

Weather Appreciation Day

A little while ago, I complained about the "dreab" days. It is time to now express my appreciation for the beautiful days we are having -- temperatures in the 70s, blue sky with cottony clouds floating lazily along, trees flowering everywhere -- who could ask for more glorious weather than this? And waking to birdsong in the birch tree right outside our bedroom window is also a wonderful blessing. I was out gardening today, and there are no bugs to speak of yet. I am ever so thankful for these days. 


My thoughts go back to the first warm days of spring when I was a child. We'd retire our shoes and socks (often for the summer) and Mem would soon rally help to plant the garden, which in our case was the size of a field. She used to plant vegetables that some people have never heard of, such as salsify (she called them vegetable oysters) that she would leave in the ground over the winter. We'd dig them up with spring parsnips before Datt would plow and harrow the garden. To this day, salsify and parsnips are like tasting early spring for me -- what great flavor the salsify would add to our soups and stews! And Mem prepared the parsnips by cutting them up and boiling them with potatoes in large chunks. Just before they became soft, she would drain them, and then fry them in butter, salt, and pepper. Yum! (I now add minced fresh parsley to them, which adds another flavor.)

Salsify 

Parsnips

Spring cleaning was something else that came with this time of the year... windows would be opened, everything aired out, walls and ceilings washed or painted, all the bedding washed and hung out to dry, and we'd even take our mattresses out on the new grass and pound the dust out of them with a broom. Every drawer would be cleaned out and organized, the furniture was washed, the windows were washed until they shone, the curtains were washed, ironed, and put up on the clean windows, and finally the floors were scrubbed, and the washed hand-woven rugs were laid down on the clean floors. When we finished, it always felt like we were starting out the summer anew. 


Speaking of cleaning, David and I are about to undertake washing the windows and installing the screens for the summer, so I need to get on that.


So, instead of asking how you manage the dreab days, I am going to ask that you describe the ways in which you appreciate spring and the "perfect" days that we are sometimes blessed with at winter's end and before the heat of summer sets in.

Your Answers

Thank you everyone who answered my questions last week. I found them very interesting. 


Christine, that is a good point that people are reading the Amish fiction for their "wholesome" qualities, and also that people are not necessarily going to change their views of the Amish, even with "data" to the contrary. 


Gumbo Soul, thank you very much for your compliments. There are others who are also sharing their real experiences through their blogs of having grown up Amish. Taken together, I hope people can glean an understanding of what it was like for those of us who actually lived the life of an Amish person. Also, you will notice how our experiences varied. I am still learning just how diverse Amish communities are. 


MooMama, it seems your reason for reading Amish fiction is similar to what Christine mentioned. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to try to understand why Amish fiction is so popular, but I am naturally curious, considering most of the Amish fiction out there doesn't depict a very realistic portrait of Amish life -- at least not as I experienced it.


Becky, I very much appreciate your desire to learn about other cultures/religions and your compliments about Mary Ann's and my blog. There are more "former Amish" voices soon to be heard via blogs and memoirs. I'm sure the numbers of us will not be as numerous as the authors of Amish fiction, but we'll still be offering a more authentic depiction of Amish life.


Karen, thanks for your answer about being interested in Amish life. Some people who live around/near the Amish actually become disenfranchised when they see (especially the youth) acting in such a way that their views may be altered of the Amish in general. It sounds like your experiences served to deepen your interest in the Amish way of life. There are certainly aspects of Amish life that mainstream Americans can learn from. I hope you had a wonderful Mother's Day weekend.


Sarah, welcome to the blog. Glad you find it helpful. Your fiction sounds somewhat different than most out there. Good luck with it.


Richard, interesting that you see the Amish fiction continuing full steam ahead. 


Darlene, your point is very well taken -- when you read the Amish fiction, you see the difference between fantasy and reality. From questions I've fielded at book talks, I'd say many people don't make that distinction. There are many misconceptions out there about Amish life, and people will cite the books they've read as the reason for believing these things. 


Thanks again, all, for your answers to my questions.


Note: Just tonight I discovered there were quite a few comments that I missed earlier that never got posted. My gmail groups certain emails together, and I think I must have missed them because of this "grouping." I posted several of these tonight that were sent some time ago. So sorry about that. I'll need to be more careful about going through my comments more often.

Amish Fiction - Which Comes First?

I have been pondering a question that I would like to ask of you. According to the article "Chasing the Bonnet" by Beth Graybill, Amish fiction is one of the hottest genres on the market. The librarians I talk to are amazed at how these books fly out of their libraries; Amazon shows that the number of any one of the hundreds on the market sell really well; and the number of Amish fiction authors keeps growing. 


My question for my readers is this: Do you think that the intrigue in the Amish are at an all-time high because of all this Amish fiction, or do you think it's the other way around -- there is all this Amish fiction because the intrigue in the Amish is at an all-time high?


Mary Ann asked this question on her blog A Joyful Chaos the other day: Do you think interest in the Amish culture will peak and start waning any time soon? Why?


I found the answers very interesting. Most people said they thought it wouldn't wane, that the Amish will always remind us of a simpler life when life in the outside world is so complicated. This really intrigued me, because it implies that nothing changes among the Amish. And this is perhaps one of the reasons why the Amish are romanticized, when the change in the mainstream society is occurring so rapidly that we sometimes feel we are spinning out of control. But the Amish do change. And circumstances change. What if things came to light that would cause the readers to see that these novels are but a fairy-tale version of Amish culture, and therefore not at all what Amish life is really like? Would the readers who love these stories continue to love them, or do they love them now because they think this is a true picture of the Amish and their lifestyle?


I look forward to hearing your answers. This could be an interesting discussion.

Plain and not so Simple

Peter wrote:
thanks for your thoughts, maybe I will talk to the Humanities Council about changing the book. I have also been reading Sue Bender's book book, 'Plain and Simple.' Do you have any thoughts on her work?


Some years ago, my mother gave me some advice when she found out that I was writing and hoping to get my work published. She wrote this to me in a letter, "Let me give you some advice about your writing. If you write only good things about the Amish, then your books will sell better." 


Needless to say, I did not follow Mem's advice. This morning I read my own thoughts in an essay by Nikky Finney in Poets and Writers magazine when she wrote: "I too forgive, but I don't forget. In the forgetting we miss something important about the climb, the struggle, the loss of life, the loss of dreams. My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away."


These are powerful words for me -- I may not have been able to be so articulate in conveying this, but these are my sentiments exactly.


And this is why Plain and Simple by Sue Bender bugs me -- because it does completely the opposite. I hadn't taken it off my shelf in ages, so when I just did, I was surprised that I wrote in the margins my reaction to some of what she herself deems "a cloyingly sweet, rosy-colored-glasses rendition of my personal fairy tale, with me cast as the frog princess... with my new friends, the gentle, pious, hardworking, unself-conscious Amish, cast as the heroes and heroines." (Page 82).


She also describes herself on page 4 as someone who "organized her life around a series of black-and-white judgments."


If someone is going to understand the Amish from the outside looking in, they cannot be seeing things in black and white, and they cannot be looking through rose-colored glasses. And, perhaps more importantly, they will not get a balanced or nuanced view of them by living with two different families a few weeks at a time.


How someone manages to put a culture up on a pedestal and condescend them at the same time, I don't know, but Sue Bender somehow manages that. Take, for example, on page 41 when she wrote about having met Eli: "After meeting his chubby wife, I thought he looked as if he had come from a more modern generation that knew being fat wasn't healthy." 


And on page 46 she wrote: "To my horror, breakfast consisted of sugared cereal with a dollop of honey and a few teaspoons of sugar added for good measure.... I was living in white sugar heaven. I mostly watched and nibbled on white bread toast, not ready to give up my regime of freshly squeezed orange juice, granola, whole wheat bread, and nonfat milk."


And on page 57 she wrote: "'Pass the fat, pass the carbohydrates,' I imagine them saying. Each day we picked sweet, fresh strawberries, but before they reached the table, they'd been sabotaged by mounds of sugar." Bender was clearly judgmental about this Amish family's eating habits. 


Bender goes on to criticize something that she completely missed as one of the few ways that Amish women get to express themselves -- most of them love to own and display pretty dishes. On page 58 she wrote: "In their world they chose well, but when faced with a bewildering array of choices in the outside community, they often chose unwisely. In fact, before the 1850s, when they led a spartan and isolated life, their homes were bare, but handsome." [I have written in the margin here, "How do you know?] "Now with affluence, many homes had fussy china proudly displayed in living room cupboards."


Considering Bender is so judgmental about these issues, it is completely off-putting to me that the more hefty issues are glossed over. This is how she dealt with the Amish limiting education to the eighth grade on page 62:


The Amish leave school after the eighth grade because they fear further education might lead a person off the path of humility and toward a feeling of self-importance. Even so, every person I met spoke two languages, switching back and forth with ease, and understood high German that was used in the Sunday service, while I, with two master's degrees, remained mute in every foreign land I ever visited." 


I have written in the margins, "By making this comparison, you make the issue of children leaving school so early simply disappear." In the next paragraph, Bender moves on to another subject, by asking Eli why the land is so beautiful.


I have written several posts and a paper on my website about this issue, which I happen to feel quite passionate about: Amish and Education, The Ramifications of Wisconsin vs. Yoder, and the full essay on my website.


On page 65 Bender remarked about how Amish people looked so similar to one another with their dress. And she wrote: "But they could determine in an instant where someone belonged in their structured society."


My remarks to these are: "This is not always a good thing; it doesn't leave room for that individuality so important to you, when you are assigned a role. Think of the "black sheep" family in the community. 'Belonging' no longer has the same meaning when you have been cemented into that role." For more on this, I have written a post, which you can read here.


Sue Bender was one of the first people to make the misinformed claim that the "running around" period is: "... the time for teenagers to make a choice. That was what it was about. Making a conscious choice." I have written in the margins, "No, no and NO!" I wrote quite a few posts about this here on my blog: To Leave or not to Leave, That Sticky Wicket, and Rumspringa Revisited.


To be fair, Bender did offer one sentence of commentary when she wrote: "I might have argued that the purpose of their early training was to indoctrinate them to make that crucial choice." Then she goes on to give statistics about how many Amish people leave and what their retention rates are. So, she basically left that issue dangling, by not going deeper.


She treats the issue of shunning in a similar fashion: 


For me it seemed all or nothing. If you followed the rules, you belonged and reaped the benefits of a close-knit community. If you broke the rules, "you were on ice at home and in hot water in the community." If I had been able to talk to Eli about shunning, I could imagine him saying, "Standards must be met. If you care about your community, then commitment to the rules is important. Otherwise we'd disappear and just melt into the English world that surrounds us." For him it would be a crime not to support his principles. 


In my estimation, when Bender changes to Eli's point of view, she completely avoids this weighty issue. She is willing to judge them for the food they eat and that they are "chubby," but not the far more fundamental issue of how they treat people who decide not to stay within the confines of the community in which they were raised. For my views on this issue, please see Shunning.


About the issue of the women's role in the community, she has to be in a hot air balloon to first mention it. She wrote on page 75: 


When Gerry, the man who introduced me to the Yoders, invited me to join him and two Amish men in his hot-air balloon, I accepted. I was the first woman to go on the trip and was terrified every moment, but I went. From my perspective high up in the air, looking down at the patchwork of green fields, I thought it might be more fun to be an Amish man than an Amish woman.


I have written into the margin, "And you didn't realize this the first day?" 


Bender goes on to ask these questions: "Was Emma jealous of my freedom? Did she think me brazen to be comfortable around men? Was I having such a good time at her expense? [ ] Did my presence in her home make her question her role or the strict rules that governed her life?" I have written in the margins, "By dangling these questions out there, you don't have to deal with the gender inequality among the Amish." 


Bender then went on to describe Emma's lack of confidence in the outside world, and how her home was a sanctuary, and how she had a clear picture of "the right way to be." Then, in half a sentence, she finally hit on the real issue, "It is true she didn't get to choose it..." She then glossed over this by describing how Emma doesn't question and how she knew what she did mattered. Bender clearly had an aversion to grappling with the difficult issues. 


Bender claimed she "heard voices" about visiting the Amish. After her first visit, she found another family in a different community who would allow her to visit them. She described the desire to belong, but then there is an abrupt shift when she wrote on page 119: "Suddenly, while churning butter one day, I knew part of this journey was over. There were no more questions I needed to ask. This seemingly irrational process that had propelled me first to Iowa, and then to Ohio, was finished. I knew it totally, in every cell."


Several paragraphs later, Bender described the voice she heard that told her to write down her story. I wrote this in the margin: "If this 'voice' is real, and not just a way of justifying this book, it still does not excuse you of the obligation of getting permission from the people you visited to write about them. As it is, you managed to both exploit these people and romanticize them at the same time."

Another aspect of this book that would have been more appropriate as an inner conflict, but was externalized -- Bender was very concerned about keeping her options open, and not committing to anything. After her journey to the Amish, which she described as ordered, plain, and simple, [all the things she wished she was] this conflict intensified. She described this in her struggle about putting together a nine-patch quilt on page 136: "I worked without a plan -- letting the Amish take over. Just as I was about to sew the individual nine pieces together, I saw that they didn't need sewing. Even that was too much control. If they were to succeed, they had to just be." On the next page she continued this conflict: "I'm not going to stitch them together. Nothing is fixed, and there is no right way for them to be."

My response: "What would be the worst thing that could happen if you sewed together a nine-patch quilt? Would you be committing yourself to something you might want to change later? Then sew another one! Your desire to keep things open-ended turns out to be ambivalent and a lack of commitment to being yourself. Sew it together, for God's sakes! After all, by NOT sewing it together, you are committing yourself to not having a quilt, but rather having fragments of fabric -- what a symbol of life that is!

Towards the end of the book, I thought she was getting it when she wrote on page 141: "But there is a big difference between having many choices and making a choice. Making a choice -- declaring what is essential -- creates a framework for a life that eliminates many choices but gives meaning to the things that remain." 

I thought she finally had it, then on the following page, she declared: "Life's all about moving your patches around..."

My response: No, no, NO! It's about the process and product of making a quilt! You cannot move around the birth of a child, marriages, graduations, deaths. They happened at a given time, in a given place. Our experiences and how we respond to them are what shape us. Don't you see? -- endlessly moving around those patches is the same struggle as you started this book with -- having all your possibilities open, and not committing to anything. 

It seems to me that an unnamed friend had it right when she said [page 88], "You love and admire the Amish, but you cannot live like them." [ ] "Maybe you can't bear to believe it... It was a personal and almost perverse quest for serenity and simplicity that is not in your nature to achieve. You are an artist, and you can't be contained like the Amish. You're too rebellious."


I have written into the margin: "Your response?" Bender gave us none. Mine can be summed up in one word: Amen.


Sorry, Peter, to be negative about this book, too. I mentioned A Separate God yesterday... another book I can recommend, this one non-fiction is Strangers in the Home: Amish and Mennonite Women in History, which is an anthology that has several really good articles in it. And then there is always my book, which even has a Vermont connection. 

Amish Fiction

Peter wrote:


Hello Saloma,
I saw your presentation on Saturday at the library in williston. I came in part because in a week and a half I will be leading a discussion about 'Blood of the Prodigal' by P. L. Gaus. The discussion is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council. I know you mentioned some of the writers who have romantisized the Amish and I wonder what you think of Mr. Gaus.


Peter, thank you so much for coming to my talk. It was great to see some familiar faces in the audience.


I don't think I can help you much with the book you mention... I have not read it, and I have no desire to. I have quite given up on reading Amish fiction, unless it is by someone who was Amish. I don't care how careful someone is when writing about the Amish, there is just no way for someone in mainstream America to "get it right," because there are so many nuances about the Amish culture/life/religion that one only gets from having lived it. I don't often make blanket statements like this, but I've given enough Amish fiction books a try to be able to say that.


Just to make sure, I looked Blood of the Prodigal up on Amazon... on the very first page, the author has the young boy thinking thoughts that would be so far from any young Amish person's thoughts, it is unbelievable. I am referring to the line, "... he had already discovered that the dawn could give him an identity separate from the others." There are so many things wrong with this sentence, I don't know where to start. I don't think ANY ten-year-old thinks about "an identity separate from the others," never mind an AMISH boy. And in my mind, this is not a well-written sentence, either. (How can the dawn give someone a separate identity?)


The few pages I read, the author is inconsistent, going back and forth between grossdaddy and grandfather. I found this distracting. And then on page 4, the character says, "Kommen Sie." Again, completely WRONG. The Amish do not speak high German, and not only is this high German, he is using the formal "Sie" instead of "du" form (of "you"). The Amish NEVER use the formal form -- until I learned German, I didn't even know there were two forms of "you" in the German language.


Sorry to be so negative, but reading the first five pages of this book does not make me want to read on... in fact, it makes me realize those of us who have lived the Amish life and have stories to tell need to redouble our efforts to dispel the myths that abound in mainstream America about the Amish. What makes our job harder is when books like this are published -- it seems new myths are created each day through "bonnet fiction."


Beth Graybill wrote an article about this genre in Canadian Mennonite. Here is an excerpt of her article:


And it is a rapidly growing sector. An April 27, 2009, a Time magazine article noted that “romance fiction, of which Amish-themed novels command a growing share, generates nearly $1.4 billion [US] in sales each year, and that number is rising.” According to a July 2009 ABC/Associated Press (AP) news story, although net sales for Christian retailers were down almost 11 percent in 2008, Amish fiction is “the undisputed industry leader.” 


For the full article, click here.


I recommend "A Separate God" for anyone who is interested in reading a realistic novel set in the Amish culture. Lucinda Streicker-Schmidt grew up Amish in Indiana. This novel is based on her own life. I honestly wouldn't know which parts of her story are made up, because she had her Amish experience to draw upon, making the story authentic, at least in its "Amishness." This means that the author does not perpetuate the myths that abound.