Review of Ira Wagler’s Broken Roads: Returning to My Amish Father

By Steven L. Denlinger

You can also listen to Ira Wagler on our podcast here.

BY THE THIRD page of Ira Wagler’s new memoir, Broken Roads: Returning to My Amish Father, I was hooked.

“And my great-grandfather, Christian Wagler, who shot himself in the chest back in 1891 when he was thirty-six years old,” Wagler writes. “Christian was buried as a lost soul, there in the Stoll graveyard in Daviess County, Indiana. They knew, the Daviess people, that he was damned to burn in the fires of hell through all eternity.”

Wagler knows a bit about hell.

The last half of his first memoir,  Growing Up Amish, had him running scared, afraid to leave the Amish church, afraid to stay, all because of what his people kept telling him.

Now Wagler is back with a followup memoir, fearlessly following the impacts of the choices he made in those early days.

His prologue touched me on multiple levels, especially his burning need to write about his life honestly, a point underlined by Wagler’s frustration at the fact that he doesn’t even have a photo of his great-grandfather, much less any kind of written record.

“I’ll never know, other than conjecturing, because no one ever honestly wrote the details at the time,” Wagler writes. “They left us poorer for our lack of knowledge of who they were.”

It’s a frustration known to every historian, every memoirist.

“That’s why I write,” Wagler concludes. 

I stopped, sat back in my chair. At that point, he owned my attention. 

I trusted him.

I SUPPOSE ALL of us at one point go looking for our fathers, and Ira Wagler has mapped out a trail for others to follow. 

Wagler’s editor must have realized quickly that Broken Roads is a different kind of memoir than his first. It follows a different narrative arc—darker, richer, more internal. It’s the memoir I wanted to read the first time around.

The memoir opens as Ira pulls out his “big old suitcase,” carefully lays in the wedding suit he hasn’t worn since his failed marriage, and tries to get some sleep before his journey home.

He’s about to lose his father, he tells you. 

“I was preparing to walk into a place I had never seen before. Physically, emotionally, spiritually. I could see them in my mind, protruding from the mists, the great dark spires of the castle awaiting my approach.”

In the decade since the end of his first memoir, Wagler has come into his own — a determined libertarian whose views on Facebook regularly anger Progressive readers, a deeply insightful writer, a contrarian who, rejecting art culture and its literary circles, has chosen to remain close to his people. He has also come to peace with the passion in his soul drawn from his Amish father, the legendary Family Life editor David Wagler.

ALTHOUGH BROKEN ROADS is a stand-alone memoir, it helps to have read his first.

In Growing Up Amish, Wagler offers a well-constructed tale, exactly the kind we imagine an Amish lad might tell after fleeing home. At least for its first 111 pages, which read quickly, like a Hollywood movie. By page 112, after he returns from his first escape, the conflict in Growing Up Amish suddenly becomes more complicated, more internal.

Once you’ve escaped from an Amish community, why would you return? 

To complete the remaining 159 pages, Wagler must reframe the narrative, shifting us from the external plot (How do I get away?) to an internal one (Where can I feel safe and secure?).  To those who romanticize the Amish, Wagler’s behavior is confusing. He leaves and returns four times, each cycle growing more humiliating.

I get it. I went through the same series of cycles myself while leaving my Conservative Mennonite community, and my reading and interactions with other religious exiles show me it’s a pretty common story. 

The internal escape is the challenge. 

Wagler gets there, finally, through a genuine faith that is transformative. 

But after finishing Growing Up Amish, I was dissatisfied. I wanted more. 

The real conflict within any memoir is that between the younger narrator and the mature writer. I needed to see a wiser Wagler reflecting on the past, his insights enhanced by years of thinking and pondering. 

For example, consider the ending — Wagler meets a wise soul, bonds with him, understands what he is missing, and yields to Christ all in one chapter — with general happiness ensuing. 

Yes, it was a great story—perhaps it would make a great movie on Lifetime — but I can read an Amish romance novel or watch a Hallmark Christmas movie for that. Am I to believe no one in his childhood community could understand or explain the idea of salvation to him any earlier? If they did, why didn’t I see scenes earlier that showed Wagler’s choice to ignore those moments? 

For me, the ending was too neat and clean. It felt like a deus ex machina, a solution the writer dragged onto stage at the end, rather than a solution the memoirist set up carefully from the beginning.

When I read someone’s life story, I want to see the narrator wrestle thoughtfully with their deeper motivations. If they aren’t thoughtful, we should see them become more thoughtful, see them begin to ask the hard questions.

It’s why I read creative nonfiction. 

Plunging into a great memoir is like having a surprisingly intimate conversation with a stranger over a peaty single-malt scotch or multiple cups of rich espresso. It’s like being Bruce Willis in Die Hard, knowing you’re going to die, spilling how you really feel to that earthy LA cop. 

It means turning a complete stranger into a lifelong friend.

HERE’S THE GOOD news. In Broken Roads: Returning to My Amish Father, you get all that depth—and more.

This depth didn’t come without costs, namely the lost chance to build on the momentum of his first memoir’s success.

But Wagler made the right choice as his first book climbed the best-seller charts. In spite of the attention he received, in spite of entreaties from publishers — he refused to jump into a followup memoir.

“I just wasn’t ready,” Wagler told me recently.

By then, he was working as the general manager of Graber Supply in Lancaster County, PA — which left his evenings free to write. He was living among his people, Amish and Mennonites who understood and loved his writing.

He didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. He had earned his law degree from Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, PA, “the oldest independent law school in the country.” He’d passed the Bar on his first try. 

Wagler’s first book had ended “in a quiet place. A place of calmness and rest and of acceptance of who I am.”

But before he could write a second book, he needed fresh insights. He needed to get through several difficult battles.

 

Several years before, he had turned his back on a profitable law career. Wagler found the work “confrontational and unfulfilling,” he told me. “I was frustrated.”

 

He was also recovering from the shock of being divorced by the love of his life. He was heading into a dark confrontation with alcohol. To write a second book, he needed more time to think about everything that had happened. 

So Wagler went back to his blog, writing during the evenings and working during the day, supplying the local Amish with building materials. For nine years, he blogged about his past. 

He processed his failed marriage and divorce. He rejected the siren call of single-malt whiskey and embraced the discipline of intermittent fasting. He reconciled with the friend who’d run off with his wife — they even began a Bible study group together. He wrestled with the pain of watching his mother retreat into the darkness of Alzheimer’s.

And from this process came the deep insights found in Broken Roads.

WAGLER STRUCTURES THIS second memoir as a road trip. After the Prologue, you find him packing up his bags and jamming them into his Jeep, which he has named Amish Black. He’s heading for what he believes will be the funeral of his father. 

That’s not a spoiler. In his sophomore effort, Wagler doesn’t even try to write suspense. He’s got bigger burgers to grill.

This time, Wagler rejects the classic narrative arc. Yes, there is a straight road he follows — and it bookends the stony, broken roads in between — but that’s not what grips you as you jolt along beside Wagler. 

“We have a big field to cross today,” he tells you at one point, echoing the Amish preachers of his past.

If you’ve got aging parents, you know the breadth and width of that field.

BROKEN ROADS WILL perplex readers who prefer a straightforward, chronological narrative. Wagler has rejected that structure for a story that feels to me much more like real life. The broken roads are the memories he is experiencing as he bumps along toward his father’s home, the insights fighting to be born.

Structurally, there is the main road that leads back to his father, who is waiting for him at the old homestead in Aylmer, Ontario. And then there are the roads that break away, the moments in life during which Wagler got lost—the winding, twisting paths that taught him the lessons of repentance he needed to reconcile with his father.

I understand the importance of those broken roads.

I’ve followed some of those broken roads.

Paradoxically, you can’t stay on the main road of redemption without fully exploring those broken roads.

SEVERAL of these broken roads are critical to understanding the man Wagler has become.

In Broken Roads, you see Wagler’s combative personality emerging as he attends Bob Jones University. It’s part of who he is.

Having spent his early twenties just escaping his past, Wagler begins college late, starting at the age of 28 as a Vincennes University student. 

Occasionally he visits home, where his father would give him the “obligatory admonitions” to return to the faith. 

“Me and Mom feel that you should just come back and make your things right and be Amish,” his father says. “You really have no need to go to college. What good is that going to do you?”

But there are also the moments when Wagler and his father talk. “Just he and I, man to man. He had many questions about my college classes and what I was learning.”

There are also precious moments in which his father recognizes the academic praise Wagler is receiving, for example, when a favorite professor writes a letter of commendation to his father. 

“Dad sure told me what Dr. Verkamp had written him,” Wagler writes, “the next time I went home. And Dad actually beamed as he showed me the letter.”

But when Wagler graduates with a two-year degree, and that same professor pushes Wagler to finish his BA at a school like Notre Dame, promising a stellar recommendation letter, Wagler pushes back. His formative days are past, and he knows what he wants.  

“To someone who came from the Amish,” he writes, “that place was a vast and darkly gleaming city of secular academics and worldliness.” 

Instead, Wagler chooses a fundamentalist Christian world in which toadying ushers gleefully hand out demerits for hair that touches the collar. By then he’s joined the Conservative Mennonites, so he’s forced to wear his “detestable straight-cut coat.” But he stays, determined to thrive. And he does, graduating from Bob Jones magna cum laude with a major in English and a minor in history — with nary a demerit to his name. 

Having abandoned his Amish community, Wagler perhaps needed to prove to himself that he could thrive within a world circumscribed by rules of behavior and dress.

One of my favorite moments is the altar call at Bob Jones University his second year there, with Bob Jones, Jr. trying to manipulate everyone into standing at the end — and Wagler refusing to rise.

“I was in no frame of mind to be led by a nose chain like a common simpleton,” he writes. “I wouldn’t do it just because everyone else was. I dug in, irritated. Whatever he said, I wasn’t going to be manipulated. Not this time. I would not stand.” 

GROWING UP AMISH may be about leaving, but Broken Roads is about finding the road home. 

In this latest memoir, Wagler’s questions run deep. Safely out of his childhood world, he’s now aiming to discover how to confront the impacts of his departure, the choices he made while leaving, and the weight of that departure on his deepest relationships.

Most important, how can he reconcile with a disapproving father without also losing the soul he journeyed so far to find?

It would be dishonest, of course, not to recognize one of the book’s few weaknesses — the way he dodges when telling the story of his failed marriage.

Please understand I have nothing but empathy for someone who goes through a divorce. I’ve watched family and friends experience it. It guts the soul.

But if there’s an unbreakable rule in memoir, it’s this—if you can’t write the story honestly, don’t write it at all. As I know from my own poor choices, no intense relationship ends because one person failed. 

Yet at no point during his vague description of his behaviors during his failed marriage does Wagler take full responsibility for his actions. He lets us know Ellen cheated on him with his best friend. But what led to that cheating? Wagler never shows us scenes where he himself went wrong.

Two people were on that dance floor, not one.

Most important, what has Wagler learned about himself during his marriage? How has that moment transformed him? I want to know. The story doesn’t get the job done in creative nonfiction — it’s the writer’s reflection, process, and insight that satisfies the reader.

I LIKED GROWING Up Amish. 

But I fell in love with Broken Roads. 

The reason, of course, is Wagler’s powerful and authentic voice. In Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, she states that a memoir rises and falls on voice alone. Broken Roads demonstrates this.

Don’t be fooled by Wagler’s folksy “aw shucks” approach. He’s a seasoned wordsmith whose prose shows his mastery of the English language. Through every sentence, every fragment, he maintains the rhythm, the color, the simple patterns of his Amish roots.

He makes precise choices.

His voice also reflects his reverence for Southern writers, referring to Thomas Wolfe and “William Faulkner, who ran with his coon hounds and hick country buddies at night and churned out his writings during the day.” 

Wagler also refuses to follow the literati. He has no interest in emulating our current flock of literary wannabes, whose focus on the avant garde limits their readership to the intellectual elite.

He has no interest in applying to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

None.

Wagler knows who he is. “They were my people, the Amish, and they would always be,” he says. Their cadences inhabit his dialogue — he knows how they converse. So although Wagler punctuates his prose with fragments, his narratives are driven by clean, masterful syntax.

So. 

Full stop.

Given the care Wagler uses to craft his creative nonfiction, I cannot understand his decision to mar the precise artistry of his prose with cliches such as “shelter from the storms” and “a heart that refuses to be healed will never be truly free” and “like a stuffed shirt” and “getting clobbered over the head with a 2X4.” 

They pop out like pimples on translucent skin.

Perhaps they slipped past the editor’s pen.

Those false notes fade into the background, however, when the rattling buggy wheels of Wagler’s prose lock onto the main highway stretching through this memoir. 

When he’s slogging the dark ravines of his mother’s illness, when he’s pursuing his father’s blessing — Wagler writes with the rhythm of demonic hounds howling, the grace notes of an angelic descant trailing above. The memoir hurtles forward — down this road, around that corner, and over the muddy plains soaked in the “delicious amber fire” of whiskey. 

During his bleakest moments, Wagler exposes the true cost of his life’s quest for freedom. 

When he’s slogging the dark ravines of his mother’s illness, when he’s pursuing his father’s blessing — Wagler writes with the rhythm of demonic hounds howling, the grace notes of an angelic descant trailing above. The memoir hurtles forward — down this road, around that corner, and over the muddy plains soaked in the “delicious amber fire” of whiskey. 

EVENTUALLY, WAGLER REACHES that small Amish kitchen in Aylmer where he and his father forge a peace. 

For decades, Wagler’s father has shut him out. Long years after the Amish church had lifted the ban, his father would “still shun me, he told me, because he felt like it was the right thing to do. And he did. Back then. For a lot of years.”

To be fair, across both books, Wagler has caused his father great pain. 

“I remember the great chasm that separated us. The harsh, hollow words that echoed in anger and sadness across the great divide…. I was a hothead, strong willed and filled with passion, rage, and desire. Stubborn. Driven. As was he. I was my father’s son.” 

One afternoon on a trip home, as Wagler visits his mother stricken by Alzheimer’s, he shares an unusually honest conversation with his father about his first memoir, Growing Up Amish, which his father has read. In that book, Wagler tells the story of a beautiful young Amish girl, Sarah, whom he dated, almost married, but then abandoned. 

Now Wagler owns up to the pain he has caused.

“[My father] talked again about Sarah, too, and how I’d wronged her. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did. I did wrong her, very much so.’”

It is at this point Wagler’s father makes a decision. Something changes. Perhaps it is the loss he feels during his wife’s slow fade. Perhaps he recognized in his son’s words a genuine spirit of repentance for the pain he has caused the family.

After they are called to lunch—a time when his father has for decades eaten separately from Wagler—his father “stumped over to the little table and took his seat.”

The son is stunned, recognizing what has occurred.

“‘This is a remarkable moment,’ I thought. ‘Not that long ago, he wouldn’t sit with me at any table. He wouldn’t eat with me. Because he was shunning me.’”

But now the two men prepare to pray. “I wondered if he’d pray aloud. He used to, years back. And sure enough, he spoke it…. I sat there and drank it in.”

Through an act of a father’s forgiveness, a simple Amish lunch—“Meat, chips, lettuce, freshly chopped tomatoes, and cheese”—has become a communion service graced by the Divine. 

Broken Roads: Returning to My Amish Father can be now be pre-ordered on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback for a May 12th release. An Audiobook CD will be released as well.

You can also listen to Ira Wagler on our podcast here.