Just Like Glass

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.

“In this unusual and affecting memoir, Amy Wight Chapman upends our expectations for how a story should be told.” —Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys and How to Read a Book

“Just Like Glass takes us to a rustic family cabin—what around here we call a camp—and shows us what it means to be rooted and constantly renewed in a place, even if the dad who dreamed it is gone. This sweet book warmed my heart, opened my eyes, and made me sing.” —Bill Roorbach, author of Lucky Turtle, Temple Stream, and Beep

“A genre-bending book that brilliantly blends memoir with creative non-fiction, fiction, and reportage. The writing is as salt-of-the-earth beautiful as the author’s quintessentially mid-century New England family and their universal journey through hope, loss, grief, resilience—and back to hope again, eternal as always.” —Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood

“A sort of We Took to the Woods meets Swiss Family Robinson, this sweet, evocative, and moving family memoir will leave you longing for a dock, a deck, and company as delightful as the Wight clan.” —Elizabeth Peavey, author and playwright, My Mother’s Clothes Are Not My Mother