By intricately weaving together adolescent memories, adult experiences and contemplations about the future, Hoffert’s memoir Prairie Silence (Beacon Press) is a distinctly American memoir. In this interior moment, Melanie Hoffert expresses an essence of her reality: a relatable, basic truth about growing up “feeling different.” Whatever the reason for this feeling, whether the context is urban, suburban or rural, the emotions are universal. And yet the entire idea of being with a woman, being in love with a woman, was so deeply engrained in my being I couldn’t dismiss it, not even as my physical reality begged me to reconsider the sanity of it all. The people of the prairie gave me no context for my feelings. In this evocative memoir, Hoffert offers a deeply personal and poignant meditation on land and community, taking readers on a journey of self-acceptance and reconciliation.‘Prairie Silence: A Memoir’ by Melanie Hoffert

Her stories about returning home and exploring abandoned towns are woven into a coming-of-age tale about falling in love, making peace with faith, and belonging to a place where neighbors are as close as blood but are often unable to share their deepest truths.

While home, working alongside her dad in the shop and listening to her mom warn, ?Honey, you do not want to be a farmer,? Hoffert meets the people of the prairie. This loss prompts Hoffert to take a break from the city and spend a harvest season at her family?s farm. Meanwhile, as time passes, her hometown continues to lose more buildings to decay, growing to resemble the mouth of an old woman missing teeth. When the farmers ask if she?s found a ?fella,? rather than explain that?actually?she dates women, she stops breathing and changes the subject. The prairie is a hard place to stay?particularly if you are gay, and your home state is the last to know. For Hoffert, returning home has not been easy. Like most rural kids, she followed the out-migration pattern to a better life. A land where she imagines standing at the bottom of the ancient lake that preceded the prairie: crop rows become the patterned sand ripples of the lake floor trees are the large alien plants reaching for the light and the sky is the water?s vast surface, reflecting the sun. A rural expatriate?s struggle to reconcile family, home, love, and faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people Melanie Hoffert longs for her North Dakota childhood home, with its grain trucks and empty main streets.

Prairie Silence by Melanie Hoffert