Teri O'Brien, Reading and Book Signing
While I Danced Alone with the Moon Across the Front Yard
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Wednesday, May 23, 2018 at 6:30 pm
Teri O"Brien, author of While I Danced Alone with the Moon Across the Front Yard
Historic Northampton, 46 Bridge Street, Northampton, MA 01060
This event is free and open to the public.  First come, first seated.
While I Danced Alone with the Moon Across the Front Yard
by Teri O'Brien
EAK-SLO PRESS, HAYDENVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS

While I Danced Alone with the Moon Across the Front Yard is Teri O’Brien’s new memoir of growing up in a large family in the small town of Haydenville in the 1950s and 60s.  Teri weaves stories of her daily life and those of her rambunctious seven brothers and sisters as they roam the village making their own fun and sometimes doing and seeing things they shouldn’t.  She recollects the telling details and notable quirks of the village personalities and relates the pleasures and anxieties of growing up in a financially pinched but loving family in a small New England town.  
Teri will read from her memoir and sign books.  Some of the people featured in the book may be present at this event.

Teri O'Brien has worked at Smith College for thirty years.  This memoir is her first book.
The book will be available for sale at the reading for $18.
​The author will donate $3 from each book sold to Historic Northampton.
Review of While I Danced Alone with the Moon Across the Front Yard by Steve Pfarrer
text from The Book Bag,  Daily Hampshire Gazette,  August 18, 2017

Teri O'Brien and her three brothers
Haydenville in the 1950s and 1960s was a busier place than it is today, though still pretty self-contained. As Teri O’Brien writes in her memoir of growing up there, the center of town had a bank, a post office, an apple storehouse, an American Legion hall, a grocery store and TV repair shop, and a building housing the fire department, a funeral parlor and the Grange Hall.

It was a “typical New England mill town” without any actual operating mills, writes O’Brien in “While I Danced Alone with the Moon Across the Yard.” There was only the ruined Brass Shop building, and, as she says: “Even I threw rocks at the windows.”

O’Brien, who works as a housekeeper at Smith College, describes what it was like to grow up with seven siblings: three brothers and four sisters. Her mother, she writes, had her hands full raising all these children but later got a job as a cook.
​Her father, a tool and die maker and machinist, was something of a disciplinarian: If you ran up and down the stairs, for instance, “he would make you walk up and down the stairs around 20 times … The worst part of the deal was you had to keep count … [and] if he did not like your answer you would have to start back at number one.”

In the end, her story is one of growing up with very little money but “a love of family … [My parents] gave us strength and showed us love through small doses of courage … I do not believe I could have accomplished what I have done in my life without my parents’ guidance and patience.”
Adair's store just before it closed
​Photo courtesy of the Williamsburg Historical Society