Why I Left the Amish by Saloma Miller Furlong

Now a Massachusetts resident who works at Amherst College, Furlong visits Burlington this week to launch her memoir about growing up Amish - and leaving.

She returned to Vermont, where she married David and had two sons. Three years after her original flight, Furlong left the community for good. But “when I saw his retreating back, I thought, Oh, my God, there goes my future. He visited her in Ohio, where she did her best to “turn off” her feelings for him and send him away, she recalls. She settled in at the Burlington YWCA, where her family soon found her, and brought her back into the fold.īut in Vermont, the young woman had made a friend named David Furlong. Her chosen destination was Vermont - a place she knew only from poring over Vermont Life magazines. “At some point,” Furlong writes, “I realized our family was serving a purpose within the community - we were used as an example of what could go wrong if one was lazy, didn’t help oneself, or didn’t properly adhere to the Amish ways.” Still, she and her siblings strove to be good members of the community - until, for some of them, the pressures were too much.įurlong first tried to leave the Amish in 1977, when she was 20. In her new memoir, Why I Left the Amish, she describes growing up with a father who was mentally ill and a mother who worked furiously to feed her seven children. “They make me appreciate what I have now.”īy “hardships,” Furlong doesn’t just mean living without electricity, or conforming to the dictates of a strict religious community. “I learned from the hardships,” she says. But, if she could exchange her childhood for an easier one, she wouldn’t. “I’ve noticed that I can relate to people’s stories who are a generation or even two generations older than me,” the former Vermont resident says. Furlong, who grew up in an Amish community in Ohio, remembers lugging water, heating it and showering under a watering can that hung from a nail. Most of us take our hot showers for granted.

Why I Left the Amish by Saloma Miller Furlong