A New Genre: The eMail Memoir

Spooky, I concluded this book was witty but insipid, sort of like a well-read girlfriend's email, and lo and behold, in the acknowledgments of her memoir, Rhoda Janzen writes: "I would never have thought of writing this story had not my svelte red-headed friend Carla Vissers pointed out that my emails from California were sounding a lot like nonfiction." No, her nonfiction still sounds like email, email you wouldn't sort into save folders either.

And then there was the cover endorsement of another "well-known" author, Elizabeth Gilbert of chick lit Eat Pray Love fame: "I literally laughed out loud ... Rhoda's ... voice ... deadpan, sharp-witted ... slayed me." And why not, close to EPL, Janzen tells us more than we'd ever want to know about Mennonite recipes, church services and hatred of sex. Janzen -- who has a PhD in grammar from UCLA a feat counterculture to the past practice of only educating Mennonite girls to the third grade, far enough to read the Bible and figure out the grocery bill -- is still stamped with female inculcated Mennonite values. First of all her rampant timidity, her social naivete, and her zeal to make the best of a bad situation.

Janzen's bad situation is marrying Nick, a manic depressive abusive man, after knowing him for a few weeks, staying married to him despite the verbal barrages and property destruction, only to have him walk out on her after fifteen years for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com. Left with a mortgage she couldn't afford on her professor's salary, Janzen decides two things: to go home to mama and her Pollyanna personality and high-cholesterol cooking, and shortly thereafter, to make some real money from the royalties of this biography.

Early in the book, Janzen confesses to which of Nick's accusations and taunts hurt her the most: 1. She has no intellectual insight behind her good memory; 2. She has no creative spark beyond her scholarly vocabulary; 3. She has no original taste beneath her aesthetic copycatting. Hey, wait a minute, Nick was right. And towards the end of the book, while she listens to Mennonite-approved music, the songs of loons, she discloses: "I am the type of person who invariably finishes a book, no matter how much I have grown to hate it." (Okay stop here Madame Blogger and ask yourself why are you finishing this book.) Janzen continues: "I always think, Eh, it's not so bad. I can stand it." This is the life vision her mother instilled, one that contributed 100% to her being domestically abused.

I'm not really sure what her doctorate is in. She admits to being able to translate several languages when that talent is discovered while she worked as the receptionist at a large law firm. Prior to finding out about this skill, she was valued as a grammatical editor. This is how she sees herself anyway, as the penultimate diagrammer of sentences not as a linguist (ooh that word must be way to close to a sexual connotation for an ex-Mennonite).

But like a good girl, I read on and did manage to find a couple sections where Janzen gets more intellectually interpretative and evaluative and less flippant of her life, family and faith. Of all, this one paragraph is the best metaphor for her osmosis of Mennonite religious view and her love of analyzing words:

"Since the players' hands must physically rest on the Ouija board at all times, it would be impossible to tell just who is conveying the urgent message. Poltergeist? ... Your own psyche? Following the pointer as it moves from one letter to the next must be an intensely slow, suspenseful process. A letter-by-letter spelling out of a ghostly message is a faithful reflection of the way we seek to impose meaning on chaos. Funny to have a board game, banned and censored for centuries, whose very punch line is the literal act or reading. You have to decode a message from the great beyond, the perfect metaphor for how we interpret those parts of ourselves that we cannot understand. Or that we don't want to understand."

At least is it a short read. And March's book is killer-bee.