The Mennonite Bestseller

Before Mennonite in a Little Black Dress hit the bestseller lists, it was almost inconceivable to me that any book about Mennonites could garner such a large audience in the United States. Canadian Mennonite Writers have been winning national awards for nearly forty years. Rudy Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear won the Governor General's Award in 1973, and Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness won the same award in 2004 and was the winning title for Canada Reads in 2006. But in the United States Mennonite Writers are a tiny drop in a huge multicultural salad of writers--and compared to the Amish, who attract huge interest, Mennonites are hard to identify or figure out.

Then along comes Rhoda Janzen with Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Her editor promised it would be big and she was right. What is the secret of this book's success?

As we began the book, I asked my students to look for "windows" and "mirrors" -- that is, windows that show them and unfamiliar world, and mirrors that reflect their own experience back to themselves.

In our first discussion, they mentioned the ridiculous family car trips, the embarrassingly uncool ways in which her mother uses vocabulary words such as "boner" without understanding their colloquial meaning, the bonding over food, the weird relatives, the frugality, the "lunches of shame." Rhoda makes us laugh and wince over a whole array of "uncool" things in life that she dares to name in a loving and frank, and sometimes snarky way. Rhoda is never far from the scrutiny she casts on the world around her, and she comes in for her share of jokes at her own expense, which makes her a good sport.

I've asked students to identify key topics that recurr in Janzen's memoir that offer both windows and mirrors to readers. At the top of my list are food, the body--especially in its humble, often less than attractive flesh, family, a history that ties the present to the past, and a strong desire to find the good in even the worst events, seasoned with a heavy dash of humor. Many of these topics tie directly into what Janzen shows she appreciates about her Mennonite family.