Excerpt from My Memoir French Boy: I come into the world.
DL: “I Come Into the World” is an excerpt from my memoir French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood. The use of Canadien, the French version of Canadian, in this text as everywhere in the memoir is to distinguish an English-speaking Canadian from a French-speaking one without resorting to the term French Canadian. [When was […]
Press Release: French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood by Denis Ledoux
NOTE: You are invited to the book launch for French Boy! The links to attend live or via Zoom are at the end of this press release. Re: French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood / Denis Ledoux, Soleil Press, 2024, 345 pages, photos, $19.95. Contact: [email protected] Release date: October 16, 2023 “It was a […]
The Wrong Point of View in a Memoir Can Throw the Story
I was challenged by the point of view in a memoir. I had put off completing the book because I could not resolve its thematic problems.
Another Bucksport Story—An Ice Holiday
One morning, when the sun promised to be bright and the sky clear, as we sat down to breakfast at refectory tables, on a day that seemed to be a day just like every other day in January, Father Guy would announce, “Aujourd’hui, c’est un congé de glace [Today, we are having an ice holiday].”
Collecting Memories at My Class Reunion
This weekend of September 26-28, 2014, I am reuniting with my high school classmates. We have not seen each other in 30 years—not since our 20th class reunion. Back then, we developed an intimacy and an affection for each other that someone attending a regular high school cannot have experienced with classmates they saw for […]
My First Morning Away
The is an excerpt from a yet-unnamed memoir of my high school years spent in a seminary continues to chronicle my first days there. The school is in Bucksport Maine, and the year is 1960. In this vignette, I write about my first morning. The memoir is in progress.
Discovering My New Home
This is an excerpt from a memoir I am thinking of calling either In Another Century or A Very Catholic Boy. I am 13, and in the previous excerpt, I have just arrived at the seminary high school where I will be living. The excerpt starts as I have brought my trunk up to the […]
When I Arrived at the Seminary
An excerpt from my high school memoir. It wasn’t until my father turned onto Middle Street and drove the 1955 red Ford station wagon up the hill towards the seminary that I gave in to the looming presence of doubt. Was this really what I wanted?
The Summer Before I Left
At 13, as I moved tremulously into adolescence, I knew that, whatever I did, I was leaving childhood and my life would soon be different from what it had been, but I could not appreciate how the difference would be marked not in age but in culture.