When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine
By Monica Wood
Published 2012
Read Sept 2025
This reader reads few memoirs, but this one was a must-read for this reader after reading several of her novels.
Monica Wood grew up in Mexico, Maine, across the river from Rumford, Maine. Oxford Pulp and Paper Company was the major employer for these two towns and the surrounding area. Her father worked for this company.
This reader went to this mill in Rumford, Maine twice in 1977 with her employer. The mill was no longer Oxford Pulp and Paper. At that time, the mill was part of one of several corporations who owned the facility over the years following the sale of the mill by the family who founded it and ran it for three generations. This reader was an intern at a supplier to the paper industry that made a retention aid product that helped retain tiny pieces of cellulose and additives (such as clay, titanium dioxide, and others) in the paper web as it was made. Retention aids were becoming increasingly important to the paper industry at that time as it sought to reduce water pollution that the industry had historically caused. So, this reader wanted to know more about life in Rumford, ME and its neighbor across the river, Mexico, ME.
Two other reasons made this must-read. First, every book by this author that this reader encountered was great so this memoir would give this reader more insight into this author. Second, Monica Wood and this reader are contemporaries. Ms Wook was born in 1953 and this reader in 1957, so our childhoods occurred in a similar time period in the history of the country.
Like this reader’s family, Monica Wood’s family had a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked many hours in a factory and brought home a very comfortable middle-class income. But after that, the particulars of our lives were different. They were Catholic; we were not. The children went to Catholic school; we did not. They lived in an apartment in a town; we lived in a house in the country. But Wood’s talent for enabling her readers to feel completely embedded in her story meant that this reader felt she had been a resident of Mexico and knew this family intimately.
The Prologue rapidly and engaginly introduces the reader to “My Mexico”—the origin of the name of the town, the multi-cultural aspect of the town, the product of the town—tons and tons of paper that their fathers made, the mill where it was made, and the relationship of the mill with the town, the lynchpin of that relationship and the genesis of this memoir. “Our story, like the mill, hummed in the background of our every hour, a tale of quest and hope that resonated similarly in all the songs in all the blocks and houses, in the headlong shouts of all the children at play, in the murmur of all the graces said at all the kitchen tables. In my family, in every family, that story—with its implied happy ending—hinged on a single, beautiful, unbreakable, immutable fact: Dad. Then he died.”
The bulk of the memoir is centered on a particular year of Wood’s life—1963—when she was nine and the year her dad died. Monica Wood’s father was an immigrant—he came from Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her mother’s family was from there as well, but they met in the US. She had two older siblings, brother James Barry who was 27 and married with two, and sister, Anne who was 22, lived at home with her parents and three younger sisters, and taught English at the local public high school. Monica was the middle of three younger girls who came in short order much later. The oldest of these three, Elizabeth was mentally disabled and was in second grade for the third time, sharing a desk with the youngest of the three, Cathy. The girls started their elementary school career at the Irish Catholic school in Rumford as they had ways to support children like Elizabeth, but when the school bus service from Mexico to that school was discontinued, the girls moved to the French Catholic school. Their rented apartment was the top floor of a 3-flat. Their Lithuanian landlords lived on the first floor and had a lot of rules to keep the three little girls quiet.
We learn these things as the memoir rolls out through the eyes of nine-year-old Monica as she recounts the impact of the death of her family on her and on her family. He was 48 when Monica was born and 57 when he suddenly dropped dead on his way to work one day. She tells us about that day and the following week of making arrangements, viewing, the funeral, and the after-funeral wake. We listen to her nine-year-old view of this with our seasoned adult eyes and are right there with her when we were children and when we were the adults in the affairs.
Monica realizes her mother was devastated. They no longer fit the “normal family” mold—there was no father who brought home the paycheck. “Thank goodness for FDR” her mother said frequently when she received social security checks as a widow with 3 small children. Uncle Bob, a Catholic priest and Monica’s mother’s brother was also devasted and eventually has a breakdown. This was a major impact to Monica and her sisters and Uncle Bob visited them, and the kids at their school, weekly. He took them for great adventures, swimming and the like. Monica recounts their family’s visit to him at the Catholic hospital/rest home in Baltimore (the same home that’s mentioned in her novel Any Bitter Thing).
Then six months after her dad dropped dead on the way to work, JFK was assassinated. The family’s trip to The Nation’s Capital went forward as planned despite it being at the same time as JFK’s funeral. Her mother didn’t get to see Jackie but she states she felt a strong bond with her.
Wood gives us this story of her life and this year through the voice of nine-year-old Monica. It’s such a believable voice. What she understands and what she doesn’t understand about what’s happening over the course of this year is very well done.
Fortunately, Wood includes an epilogue that helps us know how the family member’s fare. Except for her mother, who dies of cancer only eleven years after her husband’s death, the rest of the family members have good lives. Anne, the eldest daughter, who became her mother’s primary friend in early widowhood, has an especially lovely story.
Wood chooses not to detail anything about what happens to the town as the circumstances of the mill and its workers change substantially over time. There are only premonitions in the last chapter “..who can imagine the strike of ’64 as the last civilized walkout, the last conflict of the “good Old days of the Oxford”? “ “The strike has tooled the first, faint alarm for what is to come, a slow vanishing, almost imperceptible at first, another thousand souls gone away at the threshold of each coming decade….”. She turns back to the focus of this work, her family. She now describes the excitement they feel as Annie, who just got her driver’s license, is driving their dad’s car through the town and parking it in their driveway. “And us is this family of women, singing the car-trip son. There is no journey we cannot make this way.”
Wood does give us an excellent view of the impact of the strike of ’64 in her book of stories, Ernie’s Ark.
As with all Wood’s books this reader has encountered, whether fictional or not, the author takes you into the lives of her characters in a way that you feel you’re reading about people for whom you really care. And she does this with a straightforward, non-saccharine manner.
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