Finding Annie Farrell: A Family Memoir

By Beth J. Harpaz

Book Overview

Finding Annie Farrell is a stirring memoir of a daughter's search for her mother's secret history. This true story begins in the depths of the Great Depression, when a woman dies in childbirth in Mechanic Falls, Maine, leaving behind five daughters and a newborn son. Their father names the baby Franklin Delano Roosevelt Farrell, but the family's faith in a faraway president cannot protect them from poverty, fires and floods. They lose their home on the banks of the Little Androscoggin River; the children are sent to live with strangers, and their father goes to jail. One girl, Annie Farrell, moves to New York with glamorous dreams of becoming a model. She marries a war hero who fought with the 101st Airborne in D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, and together they raise their own family. But away from the evergreens and lakes of her native Maine, surrounded by the decay of Manhattan in the 1960s and '70s, Annie Farrell falls into a numbing depression. Trapped in a housewife's role, and haunted by her Dickensian childhood, she withdraws. Only when she travels to Maine each summer to vacation in a rustic cottage on a lake does she come alive again. Twenty years after Annie Farrell's death, her daughter, Beth Harpaz, embarks on a journey to explain her mother's relentless sorrow and to understand why those summer sojourns in Maine were the magic cure for her ills. The author mines the memories of her four elderly aunts, discovering two hidden brothers and other family secrets along the way. And she undertakes a genealogical hunt that goes back 200 years, uncovering among her ancestors a mysterious Indian great-grandma, French Acadians, and Michael Farrell, an Irish immigrant from whom hundreds of North Americans are descended. Most importantly, she finds the keys to her mother's nightmares, and finally understands why Annie Farrell could never let go of the forest primeval.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312301510
• ISBN13: 9780312301514
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A must read for lovers of Maine---an amazing book

I am not sure when was the last time I read a book with which I felt such a connection. The author's quest to understand her mother, who grew up in rural inland Maine in the 1930s, and who wound up a very depressed housewife in New York City, would be a compelling tale even in less able hands, but the wonderful writing here makes this an amazing book. I grew up in Maine, but in coastal Maine, and I think reading this book was one of the first times I truly understood the vast difference between coastal Maine and inland Maine, even after reading and re-reading the wonderful We Took to the Woods, written about the same time period as Harpaz's mother's childhood. Annie Farrell's sisters are both well drawn individuals and also so much like so many women I knew in Maine, especially during the times I spent in Aroostook County as a young adult. The gradual unfolding of family secrets, and the realization that some stories can never really be confirmed or disputed is something most of us have found in learning about family history, but few can tell it as well as this book does. If you love family memoirs, geneology, Maine, New York City, World War II stories, or in fact just good reads in general, I highly recommend this book!