BETHEL — A book signing and celebration for local author Amy Wight Chapman’s debut book, Just Like Glass, published by the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society, will take place on Thursday, Nov. 21, at The Gem Theater in Bethel. The free event will begin with a 5:30 p.m. social hour in the theater lobby, with pizza, snacks, and drinks available. At 6:30, Chapman will read from, discuss, and answer questions about the book and her writing process.
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, after Ruth’s husband is felled by a fatal heart attack, she loads her grief-stricken children 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 a path to healing, even as they struggle to redefine themselves as a family unit, with one unexpected addition.
Presidential Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco, author of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood, calls Just Like Glass “a genre-bending book that brilliantly blends memoir with creative non-fiction, fiction, and reportage. Amy Wight Chapman’s writing is as salt-of-the-earth beautiful as her quintessentially mid-century New England family and their universal journey through hope, loss, grief, resilience—and back to hope again, eternal as always.”
Maine author Monica Wood (When We Were the Kennedys) says, “In this unusual and affecting memoir, Amy Wight Chapman upends our expectations for how a story should be told. I found her choices exciting and riveting!”
Despite having been raised in Connecticut, Chapman says she has never really belonged anywhere but in Maine, and she got here as soon as she could. She moved to Maine the day after high school graduation and has never looked back. Both of her parents were displaced Maine natives, and she has spent every summer of her life at “camp,” a ramshackle cabin on a pond in Woodstock, just three miles from her home in Greenwood.
“Just Like Glass is a tribute to both of my parents—the widowed mother who raised me to be intrepid and capable, and the father whose legacy was to remain a vital and immediate part of the family he left behind,” Chapman said. “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.”
This event is co-sponsored by the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society and BAAM at The Gem. Copies of Just Like Glass will be available for purchase and signing by the author. For more information, contact the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society at [email protected] or 207-824-2908.