 Monica Wood was in the fourth grade when her father died suddenly in the spring of 1963. In her new memoir, When We Were the Kennedys, she tells how her family was inspired by the grace and strength of John F. Kennedy's family when he was killed just a few months later. Brian Knoblock talked with Wood about her family's story at the Portland Public Library Brown Bag Lecture. Monica, the title of the book is When We Were the Kennedys, but your story is not really Camelot as people think of the Kennedys. Tell us a little bit about the story. The story, well the title works on two levels. One is the main story is, it takes place in 1963 right after the death of my father when I was nine years old. And he was a worker in the Oxford Paper Company, which was the paper mill in Mexico, Maine back then. And it's about what happens to our family in the year after his death. But it's also about two other things. I think of the book as kind of those nesting dolls. And the foundation doll is the death of my father and this family's grief. And then the one that goes over that is what's happening in the town at the same time. The town of Mexico is bracing for a labor strike that will change the relationship between the Oxford Paper Company and the town forever more. And then the third entity that goes over that is the Kennedy assassination and how that had a very personal effect on our family. Because there was a certain amount of shame around being left fatherless and for my mother to be left a widow. And she was worried that people would think she couldn't take care of her children, that kind of thing. And then to have this incredibly glamorous Camelot family have exactly the same misfortune before them. It had a strangely ennobling effect on our family's grief. There was a end of innocence not only I guess for your family but for the town as well and the country perhaps as well. Yes, 1963 was an interesting year on the micro level for my family but also for, I think of it as the teetering hinge of the supremacy of American manufacturing. And it was just about to start its long decline. And again, yes, definitely a loss of innocence in the country. And so when we were the Kennedys it works on two levels. One is how that fits with our family and how we felt about the Kennedys. But also when we, America, were the Kennedys at a certain time this vanished era is what I'm trying to bring back in this book. Was there sort of identification between some members of your family and some members of the Kennedy family? Well, I certainly identified with Caroline who couldn't have grown up any more differently from me. But she was just two, three years younger than I at the time. And it was a strange comfort that this glamorous little girl who had her own pony that the same thing could happen to her. So yes, and my mother absolutely identified with Jackie. She would, every once in a while she, this would be months later and she'd just stop and say, I wonder how she's doing. And we knew she was talking about Jackie. Did the Kennedy assassination in some strange way save your family? I wouldn't go that far to say that it saved my family but there was, as I said, an ennobling effect. We felt so, I did anyway as a child and I think I was taking my cues from my mother very much outsider. In a place where everyone is the same, everybody had a connection to the mill. I was the only, we, my sisters and I were the only fatherless children in our little school. And so there was something about feeling less alone in our loss. Or that people could understand it on a grander scale, I think. This is your first memoir, your previous four books have been novels. Why the switch? It's so funny. People have asked me that and I'm not exactly sure how to answer it except to say that I think all of my fiction, and it's a lot that I've written over the last 20 years, was aimed toward this book. And I can't say it any more articulately than that except to say that there are more autobiographical elements in each novel that it's almost as if I was trying to very carefully approach this material and waiting until I was old enough and wise enough and had enough distance to do it justice. So I hope I did. You've said or wrote that the period 1963-1964 was a year that contained almost everything that I know. When did you come to realize that? Well, I came to realize it when I was writing this book. It's so interesting to write memoir because you go back to this place and time and you see what you did know on some level but certainly as a child you had no way of articulating it. And so I think of the memoirist's voice as a way of articulating something that a child couldn't possibly do. For example, things like social class and family ties and the company town. All of these things that I certainly wasn't thinking of consciously as a nine-year-old, but it was absolutely there. And it took the adult me to go back and say, here's what you knew then and you didn't know that you knew it.