Join BAAM at The Gem and the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society for the release of Amy Wight Chapman’s book Just Like Glass on Thursday, November 21st at 6:30 pm.

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.

Despite having been born in New Jersey and raised in Connecticut, Amy Wight Chapman has never really belonged anywhere but in Maine, and she got here as soon as she could. 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. Amy and her husband, Tony, have four adult children. 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.

Social hour at 5:30 pm

Reading and book signing at 6:30 pm

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR JUST LIKE GLASS

“How do we reconstruct memories that aren’t from direct experiences, but which we’ve inherited spiritually and feel epigenetically in our hearts and souls across time? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself when regarding my own memoir projects. Well, Amy Wight Chapman has answered that question with Just Like Glass, a genre-bending book that brilliantly blends memoir with creative non-fiction, fiction, and reportage. It’s an ingenious way to share this story that is hers to tell, and ours to fully take in. Her writing is as salt-of-the-earth beautiful as her 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

“Amy Wight Chapman has created a beautiful family tapestry, woven from a blend of voices, real and imagined, historical sleuthing, and a deep and abiding love of a place called ‘camp.’ The book tracks a year in Amy’s family as they try to piece together their shattered lives after the sudden death of Amy’s father before she is born. Cleverly and convincingly using her mother as narrator, she chronicles how her plucky family perseveres through countless challenges, assuaged by retreats to their rustic camp outside Bethel, Maine. 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

“Amy Wight Chapman has invented a new form for the family memoir, working in voices, a kind of magical ventriloquism that doesn’t seek to hide but to bring to life the family tragedy that brought her into this world. 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

“In this unusual and affecting memoir, Amy Wight Chapman upends our expectations for how a story should be told. I found her choices exciting and riveting!” – Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys, The One-in-a-Million Boy, and How To Read a Book

This event is free to attend.