Plain and Simple by Sue Bender
When I was in college I started quilting. I went to a small state school in rural PA and was surrounded by Mennonite and Amish communities. I was always impressed by the simplicity and beauty of their quilts. I never really thought of their lifestyle because I was so used to seeing plain clothed men and women in horse and buggies. They were part of our larger community. It wasn’t until I moved to Philadelphia where I thought more about how they may have felt living with us. In Philadelphia, the Amish would come to Reading Terminal Market with farm fresh food or they would have stands at the city-wide farmers markets. I can’t imagine what it was like for the kids (many of the stands were run by teenagers – or younger) who went from the farm to the city on the weekends.
I was very interested in learning about going from the city to the farm when I saw Sue Bender’s Plain and Simple. It always seemed to me that ‘taking away’ was a harder lifestyle change than ‘adding’. With a second baby on the way, I am in the mindset of taking some lifestyle things away while adding a lot more personal complexity. I wanted a glimpse into a world where people lived with a lot fewer things but still led full, complicated lives. Bender’s was also drawn to this lifestyle through the beauty of Amish quilts. She herself was a quilter and saw some quilts hanging in a store. Something pulled her to them and she continued to visit the quilts until she realized that she needed to go live with the Amish.
I am still amazed that she was able to find an Amish family who would allow her to live with them. Bender grew up in New York City and lived in Berkeley, CA. She knew no Amish people but had some friends that lived near Amish communities. She didn’t know anything about how the Amish lived other than that they live in isolated communities without electricity. At this point, in this short book, I should have begun questioning this woman. What could she have gained by infiltrating the lives of an Amish family? But, then, I really wanted to know, too. Does this unknown culture, that has been living within my known culture, have the secret to a happy life? What can I learn from this woman’s experience, if anything?
Unfortunately, very little. The book was structured in an odd fashion: like a patch-work quilt with little vignettes about her experiences before, during, and after her experience with the Amish. It didn’t read fluently (unlike a patch-work quilt that comes together to form a congruous whole). It read more like pieces of a quilt haphazardly put together in order to show off the more important pieces (in this case, the author). In other words, I got the impression that this book was more about her and not about the Amish. Aren’t memoirs supposed to be about the authors? Yes, but there was a lack of perspective that made the author seem a little too self-absorbed – so much so that I was beginning to dislike her. At one point she criticizes one family she visits for what they eat (lots of sweets, white bread, and butter*) because it wasn’t what she expected even though she based her expectations on little to no knowledge of the Amish lifestyle. Her criticism of this and other small things showed how little tolerance she had for her hosts and revealed how exploitive her journey into the Amish community turned out to be. Truthfully, I think the only reason I finished it was because it was so short and I wouldn’t have felt good about myself for not being able to finish a book that was around 120 pages.
*Being from Pennsylvania Dutch country, this did not come as a surprise to me. Even just one visit to Lancaster, PA (which the author does do) should reveal the region’s love of refined sugar.