When We Were the Kennedys
A Memoir From Mexico, Maine
HarperCollins · Print & ebook · June 11, 2013
Winner of the 2012 Sarton Memoir Award “Every few years, a memoir comes along that revitalizes the form…With generous, precise, and unsentimental prose, Monica Wood brilliantly achieves this . . .
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- Who it’s for
- A quiet, readable memoir with enough texture to keep the conversation going.
- Themes
- family, grief, immigrant experience
- Pacing
- Reflective
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Winner of the 2012 Sarton Memoir Award “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, author of House of Sand and Fog and Townie 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.
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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. “On her own terms, wry and empathetic, Wood locates the melodies in the aftershock of sudden loss.”—Boston Globe “[A] marvel of storytelling, layered and rich. It is, by turns, a chronicle of the renowned paper mill that was both pride and poison to several generations of a town; a tribute to the ethnic stew of immigrant families that grew and prospered there; and an account of one family’s grief, love, and resilience.”—Maine Sunday Telegram
Quiet Pull
A quiet, readable memoir with enough texture to keep the conversation going.
Come here for
- book-club conversation
- memoir-shaped immersion
Expect
- reflective pacing
- lived-in details
Where it sits
| Personal Memoirs | 93% |
|---|---|
| 20th-Century America | 46% |
| Women's Lives | 31% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Writers' Lives
- Religious Lives
- Women's Lives
- Personal Memoirs
Show all 8 publisher categories
- 20th-Century America
- American Literary Collections
- Essay Collections
- American Lit Crit
- Authors
- Monica Wood
- Publisher
- HarperCollins
- Published
- June 11, 2013
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- family · grief · immigrant experience
- Reading lane
- Writers' Lives