Poet Rebecca Kaiser Gibson of Marlborough has just published her first novel, “The Promise of a Normal Life,” and will be at The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough to introduce and discuss the book on Saturday, Feb. 11, at 11 a.m.
In “The Promise of a Normal Life,” the unnamed narrator is a fiercely observant, introverted Jewish-American girl who seems to exist in a private and separate realm. She’s the child of a first-generation doctor and lawyer – whose own stories have the loud grandeur of family legend – in an America where Jews are excluded from the country club across the street. Her expectations for adulthood are often contradictory. In the changing landscape of the 1960s, she attempts to find her way through the rituals of life, her geography expanding across the country, across the ocean and into multiple nations.
In writing about the origins of the novel, Gibson noted, “The strange thing is that I didn’t ‘choose’ to write a novel. Almost unaware, for years – decades actually – I had written pieces that eventually made their way into this novel. I wrote them, showed them to almost no one and stored them away. When we moved to New Hampshire, I had my own office in our house with a closet, and they went in little file folders into the bowels of the closet. Until the pandemic, which came the year after I’d stopped teaching at Tufts. So there I was, in the woods with my husband Charlie, with time and space and suddenly no need to drive into Tufts, no need to plan classes or meet with students, etc., and I figured it would be a good time to go through and throw out some papers. That’s when I rediscovered all this writing and realized that I might want to make it public.”
She continued, “I do believe that it was not only the pandemic, not only not teaching, but the positive welcome I have had since we moved to Marlborough in 2004, the sense I have people are allowed and allow themselves to be who they are here – that has made it possible for me to follow my impulse and create this novel.”
The discussion is free and all are welcome. For information, call the bookstore at 603-924-3543.