Author Talk is at 1pm, Saturday, September 20 at the Vassalboro Library.
“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.
Author bio—Amy Wight Chapman
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 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.
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.
