In the fourth grade, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded that I wanted to be a hermit and live in the Maine woods. When informed by my teacher that “hermit” was not an occupation, I said I also planned to be an author. My mother was an English major and a school librarian, and I was raised with a love of books and a reverence for words.
Although I was born in New Jersey and raised in Connecticut, I have never belonged anywhere but in Maine. Both of my parents were displaced Maine natives, and I have spent every summer of my life at “camp”—a ramshackle cabin on a small lake in the western Maine foothills.
I was born eight and a half months after the sudden death of my 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. This was a fact that largely escaped my notice until I became an adult.
My forthcoming book, Just Like Glass, is the story of one year in my mother’s life. It is also 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—as well as 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.
My husband and I have four adult children. We continue to live at camp during the summer, and spend the remainder of the year just three miles away, in the town of Greenwood.