Skidompha’s Chats with Champions Committee and Maine Coast Book Shop invite you to hear Monica Wood whose new book “When We Were the Kennedys” has just been published.

Wood will appear in the Porter Meeting Hall at Skidompha on Thursday, July 19, at 10 a.m. Please allow sufficient time to find parking.

Described by Oprah Magazine as an “intimate but expansive memoir,” “When We Were the Kennedys” begins in Mexico, Maine. It is 1963 and the Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on the fathers’ wages from the Oxford Paper Company.

But when Dad suddenly dies on his way to work one April morning, Mum and the four deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift.

Funny and to-the-bone moving, “When We Were the Kennedys” is the story of how this family saves itself, at first by enlisting the help of Mum’s brother, Father Bob, a charismatic Catholic priest. And then, come November – her brother still overwhelmed by grief, her country shocked by the president’s death, and her town bracing for a labor strike – Mum announces an unprecedented family road trip.

Wood is the author of four works of fiction, most recently “Any Bitter Thing,” which spent 21 weeks on the American Booksellers Association extended bestseller list and was named a Book Sense Top Ten pick. Her other fiction includes “Ernie’s Ark,” “Secret Language” and “My Only Story,” a finalist for the Kate Chopin Award.

Chats with Champions is sponsored by The First.