Born Amish - Ruth Irene Garrett

Ruth Irene Garrett, well-known author and lecturer, is teaming up with Upper Midwest studies author Deborah Morse-Kahn to write her third autobiographical book. But what was your life like before?"" This is the question that Ruth Irene Garrett, nee Miller, has been asked again and again by the thousands of inspired and fascinated guests who have attended her lectures and programs on her life growing up Amish to young womanhood, when she fell in love with an Englischer at the age of 21 and left her Amish community to begin her new life out in the world. In Born Amish we learn about Irene's early life as a child growing up in the Amish farming community of Kalona, Iowa: school, games and chores; work, crafts and foods; clothing, farming and tumbling about with many brothers and sisters. We learn about the expectations for girls and boys, and then for young women and young men, in Amish families; of social roles and understandings about courtship and marriage; about adult baptism and the often wrenching decisions young Amish men and women must make to go out into the English world into mainstream Christian congregations, or to stay and make a life of faith in the Amish church. Ruth Irene Garrett, the best-selling author of Crossing Over: One Woman's Escape From Amish Life (HarperSanFransisco, 2001) and My Amish Heritage (Turner Publishing Co., 2003) resides with her husband, photographer Ottie Garrett, Jr., in rural Kentucky. Deborah Morse-Kahn, author of numerous books on Upper Midwest history, and a specialist in ethnic and religious communities, is Director of Regional Research Associates in Minneapolis, Minnesota.