In the fourth grade, when she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Amy Wight Chapman 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 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.
Although she was born in New Jersey and raised in Connecticut, she has never belonged anywhere but in Maine. Both of her parents were displaced Maine natives, and she 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. This was a fact that largely escaped her notice until she became an adult.
Just Like Glass: A Family Memoir is the story of one year in her mother’s life. It is also 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—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.
Amy and her husband have four adult children–“one his, two hers, one theirs.” They continue to live at camp during the summer, and spend the remainder of the year just three miles away, in the town of Greenwood.
