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.
 

Mary Alice Hostetter grew up the tenth of twelve children in a Mennonite farm family and is a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. While pursuing a career in education and human services, with a brief lapse into cheesemaking and restaurant management, she has studied writing whenever and wherever she could.

Contents
Prologue
The Girl at the Market

Part One
Hot Lard
Class Pictures
Once Upon a Time
Making Soup
Yearnings
Wrestling with Peace

Part Two
Simple Pleasure
Billy Graham’s Necktie
Cleansed at Crystal Flow
On Foot-Washing Sunday
One of the Plain Girls
Considering Lilies of the Field
It’s Only Fair
Leaving Home

Part Three
Making It to the Main Line
Among the Right People
Where Do I Fit?
Zeit und Raum
The Coming-Out Letters

Epilogue
Elegy to the Farm Where I Grew Up
Acknowledgments