The excerpts below chronicle the life of my mother, Lucille Verreault Ledoux. A Franco-Mainer born in 1921, her life is typical of many Franco-American women of her generation and, as such, is an important addition to our understanding of Maine’s ethnically diverse communities in the last century.
In this memoir which we wrote in collaboration over a period of several years, my mother shares her childhood and young womanhood with the reader. Her early years were a time when the world was very different from what it is now. Her early life was different not because she had no cell phones or internet, but, in a more fundamental way, because of how people related to each other and to their futures.
In this memoir, We Were Not Spoiled, readers will recognize many Franco-American women in their lives: their mémères, their mamans and their ma tantes.
This is a book of often overlooked details, of information thought to be marginal and so too frequently lost to students of history. A basic function of memoir is to give witness to a time and a way of life gone by, and this book succeeds admirably well at this task.
I am regularly told, “You have ghostwritten the story of my mother!”
I am pleased to present my very own special Franco-American woman: my mother. She passed a way on May 5, 12015, but her story lives on in these pages. How fortunate I am to have been able to help her write her lifestory!
The Howe Street Apartment
The following is an excerpt from We Were not Spoiled by Lucille Ledoux as told to Denis Ledoux. My Parents Establish Themselves in Maine and I Am Born The Howe Street apartment where I was born was my parents’ second home. When they first came, they lived downtown in a tenement on Lisbon Street. My […]
Starting Out On My Life
I was too young to marry, and my parents could not afford to have me stay at home. My mother took care of most of the housework, and my parents needed my salary more than they needed me to help her full-time at housekeeping. My mother had never worked outside the home except for a […]
Visiting My Parents’ Home Town, Thetford
It was my first time visiting Thetford since I was three. I did not remember anything from the first trip except being so pleased to sleep at my Lessard grandparents’ house. In my growing up, I had not had the luxury of staying over at a grandparents’ place as many other kids in Lewiston had.
Life In The Good Years
The following is an excerpt from We Were not Spoiled by Lucille Ledoux as told to Denis Ledoux. Our house at 428 Webster Street that we moved to in the fall of 1949 was a cozy little house, and it fit our family well.
The Summer I Was A “Slave”
In the summer of 1933, I started to work for the Laneuville family, who lived up the street. Like my mother, Mrs. Laneuville had a large family. However, she was not feeling well so she asked my mother if I could be spared to provide some help. This was to be my first job outside […]
After a Book is Published: We Were Not Spoiled.
What happens after a book is published? As readers of this blog know, I recently published my mother’s memoir, We Were Not Spoiled. The book had been five years in the writing and had gone in and out of my focus. When I started to interview my mother and write the text, she had been […]