Growing Up Amish

This book popped up on my Goodreads account a few weeks ago, and I decided I would check it out. I was always interested in the idea of Rumspringa--the time in Amish life where the youth run wild before joining the church as adults. Sometimes this means leaving their communities, sometimes it just means sneaking around and experiencing the outside world on the sly. The Amish believe that only adults can fully accept Christ, so people are baptized around the age of 18, give or take a few years.

Ira Wagler in Growing Up Amish runs wild for a period of several years. When he is 16, he runs away in the middle of the night from his community in Bloomfield, Iowa with his friends. They live like cowboys, working on a farm. They drink. They smoke. They meet girls. This would be the first of Ira's five trips out of the Amish community and into the world.

For the next ten years of his life, he lives in a constant state of longing. If he is in the Amish community, he longs for the outside world. For cars. For booze. For freedom. When he is in the outside world, he longs for his family and the stability that comes with the Amish lifestyle. Not even a total believer in God or the church's message, and guilt-ridden because of his many sins, Wagler also worries that he will die on the road and go straight to hell. Eternal damnation is a lot of pressure, and one of the other reasons he returns home so many times.

After returning from his third trip into the outside world, Wagler comes home and joins the church. When he is baptized he feels nothing. But he tries desperately to settle into Amish life and have what his parents have. He begins courting a girl named Sarah, and the two even get engaged. However, as life moves along, Wagler becomes increasingly aware that he cannot stay. He misses the outside world. He knows he will not be happy. So he leaves. Again. And is excommunicated

But after being out in the world, he once more wishes to return to the Amish way of life. He is also concerned with his soul. He writes, "The Amish have always taught, always preached, that once the desire to return leaves, that's when you are truly lost." Afraid of being truly lost, Wagler grasps onto his feelings of sorrow over abandoning the Amish. He attempts to return to the church. The Amish church in Bloomfield accepts him back, but he leaves Bloomfield for a different settlement, trying to create a different but still Amish life for himself.

It is on his fifth return to the Amish church he has a spiritual awakening and begins to believe in God. He also believes that God forgives him for his sins. Less concerned for his soul and the threat of eternal damnation, he starts to realize that maybe he can leave the church and not be damned forever. He decides to do this, and makes his final, permanent exit from the Amish church. He moves to Pennsylvania and joins a Mennonite church.

Growing Up Amish is moderately well-written. In writing classes you always hear, "Show, don't tell." As in, paint a picture for your reader, don't just tell them what events happened. Wagler does a good amount of showing, but sometimes he simply tells and can get a bit repetitive. These problems happened most clearly towards the end, where the book begins to get a little bit rushed. However, some of his sentences are beautiful and he turns a nice metaphor every now and then.

This book may not be highly literary, but it is highly informative and sometimes, surprisingly, relatable for those of us in the outside world. There is one scene where he discusses a boy in his school who was brutally bullied by the other children. One wouldn't imagine such holy societies to have such horrifying bullying problems (the child is beat up on a daily basis, mocked, etc.), but in that sense their schools are just like ones in the outside world. Wagler also explains all of the ins and outs of Amish life, which I appreciated. I learned a lot about a culture I didn't know much about.

I also could relate to Wagler's pull between one world and another, to a small degree at least. I often felt that way about college. When I was away at school, I missed home. Then I would go home and miss school. I know there are other boomerang generation-ers out there who know what I'm talking about. Obviously there was a lot less riding on these torn emotions. Being conflicted between home and college is much different than an Amish person being torn between their community and the outside world. When I was at school, I wasn't concerned about the fate of my soul or forever being exiled from my parents. One of the successes of this book is the fact that Wagler did a great job at making a very unique experience seem somewhat relatable.

For memoir readers out there, I definitely recommend this one.

The Year of Magical Thinking

I am not sure what I can say about Joan Didion’s non-fiction book The Year of Magical Thinking that hasn’t been said before in a review. The book is famous, a masterpiece even, for a reason—it is complex, masterful, reflective, and beautifully sad. Instead, I wish to offer more of a reading guide to the piece. 

If you haven’t read the book, here’s what it’s about: Writers and couple John Dunne and Joan Didion watch their only child, Quintana, develop pneumonia and septic shock several days before Christmas in 2003. She is admitted to the hospital in critical condition and falls unconscious. A few days later on December 30, 2003, while Quintana is still comatose, John is struck at the dinner table by a massive coronary. He dies instantly. After several weeks, Quintana regains her health. She travels to California with her husband Gerry where she collapses in LAX. She is rushed to the hospital where she is diagnosed with a massive hematoma. Quintana, once again, falls unconscious and gravely ill but later recovers.

Didion attempts to make sense of these events, and attempts to understand death. She researches death and the medical problems her loved ones suffer. She turns to the literature. She is a smart, grounded woman, but a part of her still expects John to come back. It is this expectation of his return that she refers to as her “magical thinking.”

Clearly, this book is a rough book to read. It has been on my list for about two years now, as I am quite a fan of Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking is a book that people always talked about in my writing classes in college. It’s an important book in terms of style—Didion never falls into being overly sappy or sentimental, which is a challenged giving the subject matter. (Who could blame her if she did get sentimental or sappy?) If you are going to write a book about death, this is a model of how to do it effectively.

But, like I said, all of this has been said before about The Year of Magical Thinking, so I am going to give two pieces of advice to the reader of this book, based on my own experience. First of all, read it when you must, when it fits for your life. There were other times in my life when The Year of Magical Thinking could have been of use to me, but I decided to pick it up now. The book made me scared of all of the terrible things that can possibly happen. I think if I had been reading this at a rougher period in my life, I could have related to the book more. But instead it just made me nervous. I read the book quickly, trying to get through it so that I could escape the parts of it that made me uncomfortable.

Which brings me to my second piece of advice: Read this one slowly. Read it carefully; absorb it; pay attention to how Didion copes through language. I remember in “The White Album” she writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This is what Didion is doing in The Year of Magical Thinking. She constantly puts the events of John’s death and Quintana’s illnesses into a story, into a timeline. She slows down. She takes the time she needs to make sense of the events in her life. So when you read it, don’t power through it. Take it nice and slow.

In summation, read The Year of Magical Thinking when it is necessary to your own understanding of your own circumstances, and read it slowly. Do not read it like I read it—fast, wanting to know what happens next but also trying to escape the difficult subject matter of death that Didion forces her reader to confront.

Just Kids

My dad gave me Patti Smith’s Just Kids for Christmas earlier this year, but I took forever to get around to reading it. As a Writing and Politics double major in college, I always had mountains of books to read for school and found that time to read for pleasure often just didn’t exist. After I turned in my very last final paper of my college career, I immediately plucked Just Kids off of my bookshelf and dove in.

I didn’t know very much about Patti Smith’s life, although I had been a fan of her music for quite sometime. I knew she dated Tom Verlaine of Television, who coincidentally looks like a male Patti Smith. I knew she grew up in my home state of New Jersey and lived in the city like many other artists of her era. But I didn’t know much about Smith’s relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Their relationship is the focal point of Just Kids, the lens through which Smith sees the 1960s and 70s. When Smith embarks into New York City for the first time, she scrambles around trying to find jobs. Eventually, she meets Robert Mapplethorpe, a young artist and the two join together, kindred lost souls on the streets of New York City.

The two strike up a romance, one that morphs over time. More important than their romance, however, is the artistic space and spirit that Smith and Mapplethorpe nurture between them. They—especially Mapplethorpe—are constantly creating. Smith writes poetry, records songs, paints. Mapplethorpe takes photos, paints, and always tries to push the envelope with by depicting things like S&M imagery. Smith musical inspiration—Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground—and her love for poet Rimbaud inspire her work. Mapplethorpe’s never-dying admiration of Andy Warhol plays a significant role in shaping his art.

A cast of 1960s/70s artists weave in and out of their lives and the pages of the book. Mapplethorpe and Smith stay at the famous Chelsea Hotel for a period of time where they meet Janis Joplin. Hendrix makes an appearance later on. Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, the punk poet, are there as well.
An important narrative in the book is how Smith and Mapplethorpe remain tied in different ways until the end of his life. The art they create in the shared space of their trust for one another carries them from lovers, to friends. It helps them through Mapplethorpe’s battle with defining his sexuality and his later struggle with AIDs. And it helps them through the inevitable poverty that comes with being a young artist.

Beautifully crafted, Just Friends is a long, articulate portrait of the 60’s and Smith and Mapplethorpe’s world. Patti Smith has proven herself not only as a musician and a poet, but a wonderful crafter of long-form creative non-fiction, autobiography, and memoir. My only complaint is that the book can be slow-paced at times, but even when it is slow the language is consistently rich.

While reading the book though, I couldn’t help but think how different the world was at that time—
their room at the Chelsea was $50/week, for example. Smith has said herself that the East Village is no longer hospitable to young artists like her and Mapplethorpe. Even Brooklyn, which served as the artists’ haven only a few years ago, is now a pretty pricey place to live. The world has changed since the 60s into a place where the room and ability for the young artist to grow has gone from challenging to near impossible. 

That isn't saying that Smith and Mapplethorpe had it easy. In one part of the story, Mapplethorpe is so malnourished that he gets horribly ill and contracts trench mouth. If anything, Smith also disproves the notion that it was easy for people to go to the city and become an artist without any struggle. She illuminates just how hard things could be, even if at the end of the day 1960s East Village was a better scene for the starving artist than it is today. 

Just Kids playlist--listen on Youtube
1. Gloria--Patti Smith 
2. Me and Bobby McGee--Janis Joplin 
3. Marquee Moon--Television 
4. Because the Night--Patti Smith
5. Blank Geneartion--Richard Hell and the Voidoids 
6. Hey Joe--Patti Smith
7. Touch Me--The Doors
8. Voodoo Child--Jimi Hendrix
9. Piss Factory--Patti Smith 
10. Heroine--The Velvet Underground