Marlborough – Saloma Furlong, author of “Why I Left the Amish,” will be the featured author in the third program in a series of four of the Friends of the Marlborough Public Library's “MetroWest Daily News/Marlborough Enterprise 2012 McConnell Author/Celebrity Series No. 29.” The event will be presented Wednesday, April 18, at 7 p.m., in the library's Bigelow Auditorium.
“There are two ways to leave the Amish – one is through life and the other through death,” writes author Saloma Miller Furlong, who grew up in an Amish community in Ohio. “To leave through life, one has to deliberately walk away.” Furlong tells how she made this difficult break in her memoir, “Why I Left the Amish.”
Furlong told her story in the recently aired PBS American Experience program, “The Amish,” Feb. 28.
Furlong's return to the Amish community for her father's funeral frames the story of how she came to leave 24 years earlier. One of seven siblings in a dysfunctional family, Furlong endured the violent outbursts of her mentally ill father, lack of protection from her mother, and physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her older brother, Joe. She recounts a life defined by the austere traditions of the Amish and the pressure to obey and conform.
Admission is free and the program is open to the public. Marlborough Public Library is located at 35 West Main St. For further information, call 413-648-9663, email [email protected], or visit www.mpl-riends.org.
