I grew up Old Order Amish in Holmes County, Ohio. I married at nineteen. I left at twenty-seven. This is my story.

My name is Hannah. For years I have told my story in ten-minute videos — the things my community would never allow me to say out loud. And I am grateful, truly grateful, for every woman who has watched.

But a video can only hold so much. There are whole rooms of my life that simply cannot fit inside an episode. If the videos are the truth from behind the prayer cap, this book is what was underneath the cap the whole time — the parts I could never lift it far enough to show you.

For a long time I thought I was writing this to be heard. My community had decided what my story meant before I ever got to tell it myself, and part of me needed to take the telling back. But somewhere along the way — in the letters from women who recognized their own kitchens in mine — the reason grew larger than me.

I am writing it so that a woman sitting in a kitchen like the one I left, with her hands folded in her lap, might read these pages and recognize her own life in them a little earlier than I recognized mine. Not so she will do what I did. I would never presume to tell another woman what to do with her life. Only so she will know, while she is still deciding, that she is not imagining it, that she is not alone in it — and that the story does not have to end the way the people around her say it must.

— Hannah