This created an exasperating cycle of secretive departures and humbling homecomings even an attempt at love was dashed in favor of fleeing once again. In engrossing, straightforward prose, the author passionately describes the ensuing five years he spent rationalizing his desire to join the outside world while he grappled with the tidal pull back to familial safety and stability. Late one night, armed with a duffel bag and $150, he left home.

There, Wagler experimented with the worldly temptations of the outward “English society” during his traditional adolescent “Rumspringa” period, but, at 17, the itch of independence became a calling he couldn’t deny or resist. As his teenage years hit, resistance to the rigid Amish rules simmered while the family uprooted themselves to a burgeoning Amish community in Bloomfield, Iowa. His farm years are fondly and unhurriedly conveyed in ponderous reflection as Wagler admits to rarely ever being bored growing up (three-hour church services were the only exception). They enjoyed running water on the farm, unlike other more conservative Amish collectives bound by what Wagler calls the “inordinate fussing” of horse-and-buggy travel, forbidden electric and telephone service, home-sewn dresses for women and beards for men.

Wagler, the 9th of 11 children, recalls his family settling in the “somewhat progressive” southwestern Canadian township of Aylmer in the 1960s. An affecting memoir from a former Old Order Amish member who abandoned his structured family life for autonomy in the free world.

Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler