Author Talk with Local Author Amy Wight Chapman. Amy is the author of Just Like Glass.
June 26th 5pm at the Bethel Library
This event will be a discussion of the book and the author’s process. Books will be available for sale at the event. All are welcome at this event!
Synopsis:
Just Like Glass is the story of one transformative year in the life of the author’s four older siblings and their mother, Ruth. In 1958, just as the school year is ending, Ruth’s husband, Bill, is felled by a fatal heart attack. Not knowing what else to do, she loads her grief-stricken children, ages eight to fourteen, into the station wagon with the family dog and drives north to spend the summer at their lakeside camp in western Maine. Told in the several voices of the ones who lived it, this family memoir relates how a tough-as-nails matriarch and the stillness of North Pond set them on the path to healing, even as they struggle to redefine themselves as a family unit, with one unexpected addition.
Endorsements for Just Like Glass
“In this unusual and affecting memoir, Amy Wight Chapman upends our expectations for how a story should be told.”
—Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys and How to Read a Book
“Just Like Glass takes us to a rustic family cabin—what around here we call a camp—and shows us what it means to be rooted and constantly renewed in a place, even if the dad who dreamed it is gone. This sweet book warmed my heart, opened my eyes, and made me sing.”
—Bill Roorbach, author of Lucky Turtle, Temple Stream, and Beep
“A genre-bending book that brilliantly blends memoir with creative non-fiction, fiction, and reportage. The writing is as salt-of-the-earth beautiful as the author’s quintessentially mid-century New England family and their universal journey through hope, loss, grief, resilience—and back to hope again, eternal as always.”
—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood
“A sort of We Took to the Woods meets Swiss Family Robinson, this sweet, evocative, and moving family memoir will leave you longing for a dock, a deck, and company as delightful as the Wight clan.”
—Elizabeth Peavey, author and playwright, My Mother’s Clothes Are Not My Mother
Amy Wight Chapman was born in New Jersey and raised in Connecticut, but she has never belonged anywhere but in Maine. In the fourth grade, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she responded that she wanted to be a hermit and live in the Maine woods. When informed by her teacher that “hermit” was not an occupation, she said that she also planned to be an author. Her mother was an English major and a school librarian, and she was raised with a love of books and a reverence for words.
Both of her parents were displaced Maine natives, and Amy has spent every summer of her life at “camp” – a ramshackle cabin on a small lake in the western Maine foothills. She was born eight and a half months after the sudden death of her father, into a family that was in the midst of a terrible grief, as well as a struggle to redefine itself as a family unit.
Just Like Glass is the story of one year in the life of that family, and a tribute to both of her parents—the widowed mother who raised her to be intrepid and capable, and the father whose legacy was to remain a vital and immediate part of the family he left behind. It is also a sort of love letter to western Maine from the child who, growing up in Connecticut but always longing for the woods and waters of Oxford County, once declared her intention to change her middle name to Oxford.
Amy and her husband have four adult children. They continue to live at the family camp in Woodstock during the summer, and spend the remainder of the year just three miles away, in the town of Greenwood.
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