This is my symphony

Last week I wrote about my own memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis and reviewed a book just published just this week, A Place We Knew Well. Well, today I’m happy to share with you a guest post by the author of that novel, Susan Carol McCarthy. Ms McCarthy share some of her memories of that time in our history and also writes about a writer’s inspiration. As a special bonus, enter the Rafflecopter Giveaway at the bottom of the side bar and maybe you’ll win one of five copies of A Place We Knew Well. 

Where do books come from? I can’t speak for anyone else but, I know for sure, each of my three books grew out of very specific, very personal life events. Inspiration for my first book, LAY THAT TRUMPET IN OUR HANDS, arrived in a manila envelope containing clippings from The Orlando Sentinel, about a series of shocking race crimes that occurred in my central Florida hometown the year I was born, and an 8-page letter from my father saying, “Everyone in town knew the local KKK was involved, but no one was willing to do anything about it. I want you to hear, from the horse’s mouth, what I did and why.” My second book, TRUE FIRES, grew out of the first, when I discovered, with my father’s help, the one time that the powerful racist sheriff in the county north of ours, a minor character in TRUMPET, was forced, by strong women in his community, to do the right thing. It may have been the only time during his 28-year reign that the love of power capitulated to the power of love. I was genuinely inspired and privileged to tell that story.

My third and newest book, A PLACE WE KNEW WELL, was, in all seriousness, a nightmare—a recurring nightmare which I began to have soon after the events of September 11, 2001. In that dream, I was desperately afraid and powerless because the end of the world was at hand; but oddly, I was back in Florida with my parents and only ten/eleven years old. It took me awhile to realize that my subconscious had somehow melded my childhood memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the attack on the Twin Towers. Nearly four decades apart, my response to 9/1
1—shock and outrage, anxiety and fear—sent me back to a place that I, and anyone who was in Florida in late October 1962, knew all too well. So many books have been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis from the political, military, and historians’ perspective. My inspiration was to capture what it was like to be an ordinary family trapped in the swath of that extraordinary, uniquely terrifying time. This book began as a way of setting down my own vivid childhood memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it would never have been finished without the generosity of so many others, whose shared recollections helped me grasp the larger, communal story. I’m truly grateful to them for their insights; and to you, kind reader, for your interest in this seminal time. ~ Susan McCarthy

A Place We Knew Well (NetGalley)
Susan Carol McCarthy
Bantam Books/Random House
release date: September 29

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis through the eyes of a five-year-old. Of course, I knew nothing about it really. There’s a memory of my mom and dad sitting in the living room with a neighbor couple, and I heard “There’s nothing we can do” (My dad was only a few years back from being stationed on the USS Bushnell, a submarine tender in the Caribbean) and “I have some water jugs in the basement” (my mom, the consummate planner). Kindergartners know little about the world of negotiation and detente and nuclear annihilation. But kids do dream.

In my dream, our little white duplex at the end of the dirt road was swarming with Castros—they’re at the windows trying to get in, they’re walking around the living room, they’re sitting at the kitchen table. Maybe ten of them. They force my mom sit at the table and refuse to let her get up, even when my dad starts knocking on the back door. And that’s as far as it goes (or as much as I remember), but dreamt it over and over for years.

So somewhere in my little brain, I understood that “the Castros” wanted my house.

Susan McCarthy explores that period in her new novel A Place We Knew Well. Wes Avery, owner of a Big Chief gas station near Orlando, notices more than the usual jet flyovers from the Strategic Air Command base nearby: bombers, a Stratotanker, fighters, even, it was rumored, the new U-2 spy plane. The locals say the U.S. is “getting’ ready to kick out Castro”. Wes’s wife Sarah is busy preparing the Women’s Club Civil Defense Committee’s “first-ever Family Survival and Fallout Shelter Show” in just a few days, showcasing a bomb shelter stocked with the supplies every family needs to “be prepared”. If ever a euphemism fell short, that one did.

But as President Kennedy prepares to speak about the international crisis, other storms are brewing. Sarah, whose sights are set on climbing back up the social ladder she descended after marrying down, struggles with tautly stretched nerves even without the stress of nuclear war. Miscarriages, a recent hysterectomy, family secrets—all weigh on her heavily and stretch that wire even tighter, so that she comes to rely on pills to sleep, pills to wake up, pills to keep going. (The sixties were clearly a time when we believed pharmaceuticals could cure all ills.)

Meanwhile, their daughter, high school senior Charlotte Avery, just wants Homecoming to go off without the hitch of nuclear destruction. Big worries for a country of kids who should be enjoying that carefree childhood we all believe in. Mythical maybe, but still. Charlotte dreams of her dress, a dreamy date, the ride in the parade—and wonders if anyone would still be alive by then.

McCarthy captures a tense period in American history and personalizes it with the Averys, right down to the bologna and cheese sandwiches, frosty glass bottles of cola, and that fairy tale naiveté that we’d never, as a nation, reclaim.

It’s a world I don’t completely remember, but A Place We Knew Well made me think I did.

As a special bonus, join me back at This Is My Symphony next week, Wednesday September 30, when writer Susan McCarthy shares her personal memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis–her inspiration for the novel.