Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life

By Cynthia Yoder

With bare-knuckled honesty and humor, this memoir follows a young woman's search for a way out of her despair. Leaving her husband and their lives in New York City, Yoder moves to the countryside, where she collects stories from her aging Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite grandparents. With her marriage hanging by a thread, she faces her demons to make peace with a heritage she has felt at odds with. Yoder's account of that year is one of the first Mennonite memoirs of its kind.

"Normal...had gone out on a long walk without saying when she'd be back," the author writes in the first chapter. As she listens to her grandparents and works with a therapist, Yoder begins to understand what she needs to do to save herself and her marriage. As she searches for a semblance of peace apart from the religion she has left, she discovers unexpected answers.

"Home is simply a memory, a place that no longer exists in the real world after you've been away for a long time," Yoder writes. "But you can try to return... with a little of you, just that teeny part that agrees to go." Both her project and the rural surroundings help her slow down the pace of her days: "Sitting and listening to my grandfather talk, with the many silences that filled the spaces between his thoughts, time took on a different meaning. I didn't have to be anywhere but here..." Exploring at this new pace, she embraces the unexpected nourishment she finds. Originally published in 2003, the book includes favorite traditional Pennsylvania Dutch recipes from Yoder's grandmother, including Dutch Goose ("Pig Stomach") and shoo-fly pie recipes. This 2025 version includes book club questions, an original, mixed-media drawing by Yoder's sister, artist Juanita Yoder, as well as minor revisions.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933974230
• ISBN13: 9781933974231
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: Ragged Sky Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A deeply felt memoir about putting together a life

When the Manhattan-transplanted narrator of Cynthia Yoder's "Crazy Quilt" visits her family in rural Pennsylvania, her Mennonite grandmother laughs at her leather granny boots, purchased at a Soho boutique. The boots look remarkably like the old-fashioned gear the grandmother wore in her youth and was relieved to be rid of. But both women are delighted that "the somber style has been resurrected into something playful and worldly." That kind of makeover is exactly what the narrator hopes to achieve in her own life. A preacher's kid, the daughter of a Mennonite minister, she has earlier renounced much of her heritage and religious upbringing, fleeing to the city to live a Bohemian life. There, she marries a sexy ex-Mennonite rebel, who puts on eye make-up to go out dancing, and exchanges earrings with her in their commitment ceremony. Together, the couple tastes the 20th century pop culture pleasures of drag queen parties, Wild Turkey, The Cure, and open-mike poetry readings. But the narrator finds the American trick of self-reinvention hard to pull off. She remains haunted by her sense that it's her "responsibility to change the world." Her life is stalled by depression; her marriage disintegrates. Seeking a viable way to move forward, she looks backward at the heritage she thought she'd thrown off. She returns to Pennsylvania, to interview her Mennonite grandparents for an oral history of her family -- in the process, conducting a rigorous self-examination of her identity, values and faith. Yoder's journaling and reflections on her life are effectively contrasted with a series of matter-of-fact diary entries made by her grandmother in the 1930s, a sort of Mennonite Day-Timer that offers up the day's labors to God. Any woman who's seeking to cobble together a new self from the contradictory standards held up by family, tradition, religion, 21st century pop culture and advertising, and our own yearning toward something richer and more rewarding, will relate to this deeply felt memoir. No matter what culture we come from, we're all quilters, working to stitch together a sense of wholeness out of the competing images and precepts we've been handed.