Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Memoirs

WHEN WE WERE THE KENNEDYS

Monica Wood

A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

Monica Wood writes: "The story takes place in 1963, when I was nine years old. Beginning with the April morning when my father, a foreman in the woodyard of the Oxford Paper Company, died on his way to work, the book follows three deeply entwined threads."

1963, Mexico, Maine: The Wood family are much like the town's other immigrants: close, Catholic, and dependent on the wages Dad earns as a laborer at the Oxford Paper Company, the town's chief employer. Monica Wood narrates the struggle of a family of women who find themselves bereft outsiders when Dad suddenly dies and the mill is diminished by its first large-scale labor strike. The nation, too, is shocked by the loss of its leader, the first Catholic president. Wood weaves these strands into a compelling look at the steadfast maturing of a nine-year-old child confronting loss and redemption as her family, her town, and her country undergo tumultuous change. Monica Wood is the author of four works of fiction, most recently ANY BITTER THING (Chronicle, 2005; Ballantine pb) which spent 21 weeks on the ABA extended bestseller list. It was also a Book Sense Top-Ten pick and one of the 10 Best Books of the Year at BeliefNet.com. Her other fiction includes ERNIE'S ARK (Chronicle, 2002; Ballantine, pb); MY ONLY STORY (Chronicle, 2000; Ballantine, pb); and her first novel, SECRET LANGUAGE (Faber, 1993; Ballantine re-issue, 2002). Monica's widely anthologized short stories have won a Pushcart Prize. She also writes books for writers and teachers.

Available products
Book Published 2012-07-01 by Houghton Mifflin

Comments

"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. "

A specific sense of time and place pervades the tale…This is a beautifully composed snapshot of how a family, a town—and, later, a country—grieves and goes on. The bonds between family members, neighbors, and coworkers, as well as men and their professions, are all explored here with sensitivity and a sweetness that isn’t saccharine…Readers will feel like they know the town and its people too.

"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, too, 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!"

"Monica Wood has written a gorgeous, gripping memoir. I don't know that I've ever pulled so hard for a family. WHEN WE WER THE KENNEDYS captures a shimmering mill-town world on the edge of oblivion, in a voice that brims with hope, feeling, and wonder. The book humbles and soars."