Author of the week: Rhoda Janzen

last updated 8 January 2015

I’m probably not the only reader of Rhoda Janzen’s new memoir who is hoping that she’ll fall madly in love with her cousin Waldemar, said Kate Christensen in The New York Times. “Cousin Wally” comes up only in passing in Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Janzen’s endearing and hilarious account of returning, as a 43-year-old divorcée, to her parents’ conservative Mennonite household. Janzen’s immensely likable mother strongly approves of Wally, and we recognize quickly that this is a mom who believes she always has her daughter’s best interests at heart. “Wally is my first cousin,” Janzen protests. “That’s both incestuous and illegal.” Part of the book’s great charm is that her mother doesn’t back down. “I think,” she says, “that the Lord appreciates a man on a tractor.”

The crisis that sends Janzen back to her parents’ California home only begins with divorce, said Julie Hinds in the Detroit Free Press. She was recovering from botched surgery when her husband of 15 years left her for a guy he’d met on Gay.com. Six days later, she collided with a drunken driver and shattered a passel of bones. “Those things seem so over the top,” she says, “it’s easy to see the humor in it.” That she does. But Janzen also used her time back home to recognize that her parents’ Mennonite faith was about more than just gray meatballs and borscht. “Trailing one’s 70-year-old parents around town,” she says, “is an excellent and underdiscussed cure for heartbreak.”