Where’s the Moon?
A Memoir of the Space Coast and the Florida Dream
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press, 2016
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When you lose your parents just as you have left home for graduate school—glad to finally be away from a life and place you found stifling—how do you make your way in a world with no home to go back to? For Ann McCutchan, whose parents died in a car accident when she was twenty-three, the answer was to keep moving, away from the dream her mom and dad had so hopefully embraced in her childhood, and away from the locus of that dream, the state of Florida in the 1960s.
In this coming-of-age memoir, McCutchan, a writer and musician, returns to Florida to reconcile with the life she had there. Reconnecting with old friends and long-forgotten places, she confronts the transformation of wetland real estate she knew as a child into south Florida suburbs and the booming Space Coast--a transformation her father enthusiastically if not altogether successfully promoted. She revisits the frustrations and ambitions of her youth and musical awakening, comes to a deeper understanding of the meaning of the cultural shifts she experienced in the sixties, and achieves a new appreciation of the history and aspirations of the two people who meant the most to her.
"Ann McCutchan's Where’s the Moon? is an original coming-of-age story set inside an extraordinary chapter of our country's history. Her graceful and vivid memoir reminds us how profoundly our personal history is connected to the dreams of the era in which we happen to find ourselves."
Gail Godwin, author, A Mother and Two Daughters, Evensong, Flora
"This is a remarkable book with a range I've rarely, if ever, encountered before. It is so filled with the delicate precision of the personal and the particular at one moment, while in a flash--in the next sentence, perhaps—Ann McCutchan carries that tiny detail into unknown territory that contains all that has come before, all that we can imagine, and the wildly spinning rush of whatever comes next. Where’s the Moon? is a deeply moving and often very funny, personal, and always exquisitely observed account of growing up apace of--and almost as a sibling to--America's desire and effort to win the race to reach the moon."
Robb Forman Dew, author, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, National Book Award winner, Being Polite to Hitler
"Beautifully written, vividly recalled, Where’s the Moon? is a marvelously rendered memoir of an individual childhood. It is also an account of a particular place and time in American history: the tiny town of Titusville, Florida during NASA's Apollo Space Program. Ann McCutchan has written both a beguiling and important book. I loved it."
Abigail Thomas, author, What Comes Next and How to Like It and A Three Dog Life
"I read with envy Ann McCutchan's beautiful memoir of place, which happens to be East Central Florida, where lightning crashes and rocket ships flash into the night sky. Where’s the Moon? continues to haunt this Floridian like memories of a full moon rising over the Atlantic when I was a boy. This book speaks from the heart."
Jeff Klinkenberg, author, Seasons of Real Florida and Alligators in B-Flat
"The thing I like best about Where’s the Moon? is the contrast between the tiny, familiar bits and pieces of domestic life – the Harvest gold oven, the run in a stocking, the hated Girl Scout uniform – and the enormity of the Apollo drama playing simultaneously, like a ground bass. And then there’s Ann McCutchan’s own music, beautifully described, the ineffable “open door, the wide horizon” that defines her prized differentness. This is an engaging, gracefully-told story that puts a girl -- typical and unique -- at the center of the human paradox."
Rosellen Brown, author, Tender Mercies and Before and After
"Where’s the Moon? is a particularly beautiful time-and-place memoir. Ann McCutchan evokes the sleepy Florida of the sixties, abruptly transformed to accommodate the Promethean ambitions of the space program. A number of other strands are gracefully woven into the book, among them McCutchan's self-portrait as a talented, restless adolescent--no stranger to ambition herself--and a tender, elegiac view of her parents, whom she lost to a car accident soon after she escaped the chafing limitations of the small coastal town where she was raised. McCutchan has a kind of genius for remembering. She retrieves early experience in extraordinary detail and renders it in language with all the freshness and tang of real life."
Emily Fox Gordon, author, Mockingbird Years: A Life in and Out of Therapy and Book of Days: Personal Essays