Description

Amy Wight Chapman, author of Just Like Glass, will be speaking at the Rangeley Public Library on Wednesday, August 20th, starting at 6:00 PM.

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.

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 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.

Please stop by the Rangeley Public Library or call (207)864-5529 to sign up for this free program.