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.