 When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood
Non Fiction / 256 pages / Hardcover
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / July, 2012 Hello, Dear Reader! I love to visit book groups. A nice person meets me at the door (sometimes a virtual door), hands me a glass of wine, and makes me feel like the Queen of the May. New found friends ask dozens of strange, smart, startling questions; they see things in my own work that I missed; and sometimes they give me cake. Whenever I visit a book group, I leave believing that the death of reading is nothing but a flimsy myth. When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from M exico, Maine takes place in 1963, when I was nine. During that year, my father, "a big-laughing, chain-smoking man who once taught us how to hem a skirt," died on his way to work at the paper mill. Shortly thereafter, the mill, "that boiling hulk on the riverbank," suffered a prolonged labor strike. And the president, ˜Catholic, like us," was shot down by an assassin. My book is about the connections between those momentous events, connections that I hope will surprise and move you, sometimes make you laugh, and open a gate to your own family, your own roots, your own journey through loss. I want my book to connect us, writer and reader, in a way that makes us happy to share a planet. When I arrive at your door, I'll bring my wholehearted appreciation for your existence. You, I hope, will bring cake. Sincerely, Monica Wood MONICA WOOD IS GIVING AWAY 5 COPIES OF WHEN WE WERE THE KENNEDYS. ENTER TO WIN A COPY.
About When We Were the Kennedys: Mexico, Maine, 1963: The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on the fathers' wages from the Oxford Paper Company. But when Dad suddenly dies on his way to work one April morning, Mum and the four deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift. Funny and to-the-bone moving, When We Were the Kennedys is the story of how this family saves itself, at first by enlisting the help of Mum's brother, Father Bob, a charismatic Catholic priest. And then, come November, her brother still overwhelmed by grief, her country shocked by the president's death, and her town bracing for a labor strike, Mum announces an unprecedented family road trip. Inspired by the televised grace of Jackie Kennedy, herself a new widow with young children, Mum and her girls head to "our nation's capital" to do some rescuing of their own. An indelible story of how family and nation, each shocked by the unimaginable, exchange one identity for another.
Reviews of When We Were the Kennedys: "Every few years, a memoir comes along that revitalizes the form, that takes us by the hand and leads us into the dream world of our collective past from which we emerge more wholly ourselves. With generous, precise, and unsentimental prose, Monica Wood brilliantly achieves this, bringing back to life the rural paper mill town of not only her youth but America's, to its bumbling, hard-working, often violent, yet mostly good-hearted lurch forward into the 21st century. When We Were the Kennedys is a deeply moving gem!"
- Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog and Townie
"This is an extraordinarily moving book, so carefully and artfully realized, about loss and life and love...Monica Wood displays all her superb novelistic skills in this breathtaking, evocative new memoir. Wow."
- Ken Burns, filmmaker
To learn more, visit the publisher's website, follow Monica on Twitter, or visit Monica Wood's website. Monica Wood is available to speak to your book club by phone or Skype. Contact Monica to arrange a discussion. |
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