The Swartzentruber Amish, one of the most conservative orders, call leaving the Amish “going high.”154 Perhaps it’s because their lives are so modest, so basic, they could be considered earthy, low. The women in Emma Gingerich’s Missouri order could only wear dresses made of dark red, black, blue, green, or gray. After childhood, their clothes are fastened with straight pins, not buttons. Her house had no phone, and her family spoke a German dialect at home.

A tourist photo taken of Emma and her siblings as small children, in the early 1990s, shows the girls in black bonnets, black dresses, and white aprons, running barefoot to church past bales of hay. She was forbidden from cutting her hair or leaving home without a cap and bonnet covering every strand. The Amish have essentially made a deal with modernity. Unlike many Americans, they rarely feel lonely or lost; their communities give them constant purpose. All they must do in return is conform.

Emma’s order did not practice rumspringa, a period in which Amish teenagers try on worldly lifestyles, mythologized in tequila-soaked TV shows like Breaking Amish. Instead, Emma was so shielded from the facts of life that she usually only realized that a new sibling was joining the family when she heard the cries of a newborn in the next room. When she got her period, her mother told her she was like a hen sitting on her eggs. To Emma, her life often seemed lower than low: sunken.

She was the kind of kid who begged to go to the local schoolhouse before she was old enough. Her mother would begrudgingly pack her a lunch and send her off. Unlike the other kids, Emma loved school. She tried to hide her interest in it, since she knew others would mock her if they found out. Eighth grade, when she was expected to end her education, loomed.

She had thirteen siblings, but her father often singled her out for criticism. If something wasn’t on the table in time for dinner, it always seemed to be Emma’s fault, even though there were eight other girls who could have fetched it. (Girls are the default attendants of the domestic realm in Amish culture.) Taking care of her brood of siblings made a lifetime of womanly drudgery appeal even less to Emma.

Emma bucked against the many norms of her community. She never understood why they couldn’t have a toilet or electricity. She acquired a small radio and hid it in her room, tuning it to music stations late at night.