Plain: A Memoir of Mennonite Girlhood

by Mary Alice Hostetter

Plain tells the story of Mary Alice Hostetter’s journey to define an authentic self amid a rigid religious upbringing in a Mennonite farm family. Although endowed with a personality “prone toward questioning and challenging,” the young Mary Alice at first wants nothing more than to be a good girl, to do her share, and—alongside her eleven siblings—to work her family’s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, farm. She feels fortunate to have been born into a religion where, as the familiar hymn states, she is “safe in the arms of Jesus.” As an adolescent, that keen desire for belonging becomes focused on her worldly peers, even though she knows that Mennonites consider themselves a people apart. Eventually she leaves behind the fields and fences of her youth, thinking she will finally be able to grow beyond the prohibitions of her church. Discovering and accepting her sexuality, she once again finds herself apart, on the outside of family, community, and societal norms.

This quietly powerful memoir of longing and acceptance casts a humanizing eye on a little-understood American religious tradition and a woman’s striving to grow within and beyond it.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Spirituality

168 pages, Hardcover

Published December 6, 2022

Reviews

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seven years ago I was accepted to (what ended up being) a two year program at WriterHouse on memoir. I was paired with the author of this lovely book, Mary Alice Hostetter, as my writing buddy.

It was fortuitous. Her memoir was about her Mennonite girlhood and I happened to be married to a Mennonite. Even more fortuitous, the end of her memoir is about how accepting her sexuality as a lesbian put her on the outside of the Mennonite community, and my husband and I had just left the Mennonite church because of their avoidance of LGBT issues.

Working with Mary Alice to workshop and edit this book helped me process my own pride and disappointment in the Mennonite faith community that meant so much to my husband and I, yet ultimately we had to leave in order to grow. We laughed over very Mennonite scenes of not being able to claim a family member as a WWII Veteran for a school assignment and the arduous duties of fall pickling and canning to preserve every possible thing that came out of the family garden. Mary Alice taught me to appreciate all of the good, beautiful things about the Mennonite faith - the importance of community, the value of living a simple life, and how the production and preparing of food holds all things together.

Mary Alice spent years looking for a publisher for her story, getting pieces of the book published in places like The New York Times Modern Love column and The Gettysburg Review to drum up interest. She and I would check in with each other every few months, and she'd tell me of more rejections, until one day she told me of an acceptance. It was from the University of Wisconsin's publishing division dedicated to telling unique LGBT stories.

Thus, what a true joy and pleasure it was to read Mary Alice's complete book in hard copy! To see a dream come to fruition! Read her book, "Plain: A Memoir of Mennonite Girlhood" if only because you like dry, subtle jokes about the number of preservatives in Lebanon baloney. Then keep reading it because of the forgiveness and mercy woven into Mary Alice's very way of being.

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pleasant memoir about Mennonite upbringing. I learned a lot about the Mennonite religion and living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I was expecting to read a lot of really horrifying stories about harsh religious upbringing, but actually Mary Alice's childhood showed a lot of the positives of having a large family that works together on a farm and is deeply religious. I got the sense that there wasn't a lot of drama in her family, even if they also weren't very emotionally open. It would be difficult to grow up with different clothes and expectations than others in your peer group, especially when she wasn't allowed to watch movies or join the Girl Scouts and other things she would have liked to do with her friends, but I was glad that she wasn't punished severely for breaking the rules or anything, and in the end her parents did allow her to go to college right after high school despite protesting at first. She says towards the end that her parents might have wondered what mistakes they made when so many of their children left the Mennonite faith and joined other religions, but I think it speaks to her parents' open-mindedness and the strong values they instilled in their children that they remained committed to values such as peace even when they left the home and the faith they were brought up in.
Any memoir is special because it is someone's actual life, and even though this memoir wasn't terribly dramatic, Mary Alice writes well and I got a sense of what her life was like. I especially appreciated the part where she left Pennsylvania to live in a small mountain community and learns to appreciate what she learned in her childhood, and spends a lot of time making cheese and looking inward. She eventually comes out as a lesbian, and the book is in a series of memoirs about coming out, but that is really a small part of the book and it is more about her general search for herself, combining the parts of her upbringing that she resonates with and the parts of the outside world she so craved when she was unable to experience it.

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. It blew me away. It is also definitely not perfect, but I loved it for what it is.

It is an autobiography of a Mennonite woman who realizes in her early 30s that’s she’s gay. But really, 80% of the story is about growing up as a Mennonite in Lancaster County in the 40s/50s/60s. For me, it absolutely felt like reading about one of my parents’ peers growing up. Many references to Mennonite farming life and to the Mennonite church (those references were mostly negative…) But I just loved this chance to hear her perspective on all of it and to hear about her relationship with her mother and her siblings. The memories are not all happy, at all — but I could empathize with so much, even though I’m of a later generation (and didn’t grow up on a farm).

Regarding the imperfections of the book, my biggest struggle was the fact that once she hits 30ish and realizes she’s gay, the book ends just a few pages later! So we really hear nothing about her life after she turns 30ish other than than a few pages. The ending felt much too abrupt. It might be more accurate to call this a coming of age rather than an autobiography. It was also fascinating to me that this was published as part of a gay autobiography series, since just a few pages of the book actually talk about being gay. Maybe that’s part of the story… and/or maybe the early chapters were essays she had published elsewhere and she was later approached to turn them all into a book. She mentions the former and I am hypothesizing about the latter. It felt like she had reflected extensively on her first 30 years and hardly at all on the years after that. This is why I feel like it’s more of a coming of age story than an autobiography—we really only hear about the first half of her life.

But ultimately, I loved this.


Favorite quotes:

In a family where I never heard either of my parents say “I love you” in their ninety-plus years, I also never felt unloved, perhaps because treats like doughnuts were as clear an expression of love as hearing the words. At least that’s how it felt to me. p12

I had no role model for rage. In our family we did not rage or overtly express many emotions at all. On Gapview Farm we kept a cap on our feelings. We had too much to do. The chaos rage might have produced was a luxury we could not afford. p83

[Kaitlin Chambers-mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful memoir about growing up, living authentically, and learning to embrace simplicity.

[Lisa Ellison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plain is a well-written exploration of belonging that takes you deep inside the culture Mary Alice grew up in. She writes with precision, poetry, and a sense of humor that kept me hooked throughout this easy read. I admire how she's able to write about not fitting in without losing sight of the love that holds her family together. I highly recommend this book.

[Carole Duff · Rating 5 out of 5]

How joyful to see this story in print! A well-written, thoughtful memoir of growing up and growing into one’s authentic self. Ms. Hostetter’s voice is honest, wry, and wise. Her girlhood might have been plain, but her life-journey was not at all simple.

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plain: A Memoir of Mennonite Girlhood by Mary Alice Hostetler is a great one to read. I liked it because the author and I have some history in common. She grew up in Gap, PA. I lived several miles away from Gap but spent many hours there visiting my grandparents. She worked at Plain and Fancy Farm and I did too, but probably a few years after she was there. She writes of hearing trucks gearing up the Gap Hill at night as I did also from my grandarent's house. I did not live on a farm as she did and I had only four siblings instead of a much more generous eleven as she did. I also enjoyed the consistent thread of humor with which the author writes. She writes about the practices, beliefs, and rules she had to live under as a part of the Mennonite sect she was part of, but does not seem to take it too seriously, or over-criticize those practices. This memoir is a window into a unique time and place.

[Linda Spear · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very informative autobiography, part of a series Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies from The University of Wisconsin Press. I've known Mennonites who have left "the fold", so to speak, and have still stayed close to family so Mary Alice's story was familiar to me. I think it's interesting that she didn't emphasize her own "non-interest" in a conventional family life, but rather took note of her brother Charles's lifestyle. I recognize that this really WAS about her growing up and not so much the eventual "discovery" of her sexuality. For some reason, I liked that she didn't let anything get in the way while telling her story. And I appreciated that her parents tried to understand the path Mary Alice travelled.

[Mary Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Alice Hostetter has written a quiet, wise, and absolutely stunning memoir of her search for her authentic self. She was born, along with eleven siblings, into a deeply traditional Pennsylvania farm family that worked hard, lived by a generational faith that largely removed them from worldly temptations, and ate solely from the land. After high school graduation and then college, Hostetter's search led her to many new places, people and experiences that brought gentle awakenings through her years.

This tender story gifted me with wisdom, pleasure from excellent writing, and a frequent sense of being in the presence of the sacred as I walked beside the author. I hope you will read Plain: A Memoir of Mennonite Girlhood.

[Sheri Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently picked up a few memoirs written by women who grew up Mennonite. It was a good read. It makes me think about all the people who end up joining Mennonite churches mostly out of pressure as young teens and not coming to the decision on their own sort of like she did. Not saying she would've ended up in a different place had that not been the way she joined the church, but I think there is something to waiting until you are closer to adulthood to commit yourself to a church when you can think more for yourself beyond the influence of your parents and church community. I don't love how her friend was denied communion because the bishop did not approve of her appearance at the service. I hope we are better than that now, but I know stuff like that still happens.

[Melanie Springer Mock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Hostetter is a generation or two older than I am, there was a lot I resonated with in her memoir, especially in terms of resistance to the expectations of being a Mennonite girl. I'm grateful that the expectations I faced were not as rigid as Hostetter's. I also appreciate the portrayal of her father's acceptance of his gay son and gay daughter, and would have liked to now more about that part of the story!

[emily ganter · Rating 3 out of 5]

wildly interesting! it felt unpolished, like the author took for granted that we knew motivations and plot points and no editor pointed that out, and i was often left wanting more insight, depth, and nuance. it was SO engaging to read, though, and very comforting in its positivity. i really appreciate how the author didn't tear down her old mennonite community after leaving, and instead described her love and respect for them

[Karen Carnabucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plain: A Memoir of Mennonite Girlhood is a beautifully written memoir, capturing the mood of a time, a place and a culture.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was good, especially as a peek into a culture and time period different from the ones in which I was raised. That being said, there were many ways it felt like the author was distanced from herself and holding a lot close to her chest. Because it feels like she is holding back, it's hard to connect.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look into a woman’s experience with a Mennonite upbringing and having the courage to go university alone in the 60s. Her lesbian identity is only very briefly explored at the end of the book.This was an interesting insight without being super compelling.

[Kirsty]

Stopped reading at page 100 because I lost my copy! This has been on my "currently reading" shelf for over a year now in the hopes that the book makes its way back to me, but it has yet to do so. I will be finishing this if I ever find it.

[Mary Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sparse, gentle, quiet – lovely memoir and a primer on an upbringing in this religion and coming out as a gay person to a Mennonite family.

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hostetter writes of her journey to reach her authentic self coming from a large Mennonite farm family.

[JJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story, quick read

[Elizabeth Sanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book features well-written imagery and is an interesting read when it comes to learning about Hostetter's focus on feminism and gaining independence from religion.

One huge disappointment with this book was that there was literally only two or three pages about coming out or being queer. Normally I wouldn't criticize this aspect to a memoir or autobiography. However, this book was released as part of a series of Lesbian and Gay autobiographies, and the queer identity is heavily mentioned in the descriptions. Given that, I would have expected more discussion of the author's queer identity.