When We Were the Kennedys
A Memoir from Mexico, Maine
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Sarton Memoir Award. “[A] marvel of storytelling, layered and rich . . . an account of one family’s grief, love, and resilience” (Maine Sunday Telegram).
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, Mum and the four deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift. When We Were the Kennedys is the story of how a family, a town, and then a nation mourns and finds the strength to move on.
“Intimate but expansive . . . A tender memoir of a very different time.”—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Every few years, a memoir comes along that revitalizes the form . . . With generous, precise, and unsentimental prose, Monica Wood brilliantly achieves this . . . When We Were the Kennedys is a deeply moving gem!”—Andre Dubus III, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“On her own terms, wry and empathetic, Wood locates the melodies in the aftershock of sudden loss.”—The Boston Globe
“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
“A gorgeous, gripping memoir. I don’t know that I’ve ever pulled so hard for a family. When We Were 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.”—Mike Paterniti, New York Times bestselling author
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this amiable, specific glimpse of life in smalltown, 1960s-era Maine, novelist Wood (Any Bitter Thing), revisits the untimely death of her father, who was, like most of the locals, a shift worker at the omnipotent paper mill. From their crowded third-floor apartment, the four sisters and their mother mourn while struggling to reimagine their lives without him. Told mostly from the author's fourth-grade point-of-view, Wood recalls the stoic, tender emotions of her sisters playful, younger Cathy; mentally disabled Betty; and maternal high school English teacher Anne. Thanks to life insurance and social security checks, the younger girls are able to stay at their Catholic school and their mother never has to get a job "scrubbing floors," though she starts keeping "secret sleeping hours." The girls' priest uncle, Father Bob, stretches himself to become the family's male role model, then succumbs to nervousness and alcoholism, landing in an institution near Washington, D.C. Just as the women plan a road trip to visit him, President Kennedy is assassinated, and Wood conjectures that what happened to her family is now happening to the Kennedys and "the whole country." They tour the nation's capitol meditating on Jackie while surrendering their grief. Breaking the tidy narration of the book, the author jumps to her college days at Georgetown University and to the death of her mother. But thankfully she switches back to her theme about how a refreshingly functional family learns to accept loss and preserve love.
