Bedtime Stories for a Pandemic By Jessica Pearce Rotondi

I moved to New York City when I was 21 to work in book publishing. I had a tiny “room of my own” in the Flatiron building to fill with books. I could barely afford to-go coffee, but I’d go to literary readings in the city almost every night. Uptown to Book Culture on Broadway; downtown to the Strand. I volunteered at the PEN World Voices Festival every May, spent summers playing basketball in the WORD Brooklyn League, and attended launch parties in the fall at McNally Jackson in Soho and powerHouse Books in DUMBO.

My day job as a book publicist let me talk about books I loved all day long. The best part was planning author tours, when I’d connect my writers with booksellers and send them out into the world for readings around the country, rooting for them on the road from Elliot Bay to The Tattered Cover to Politics & Prose.

All the while, my mother was sick at home in our small town near Boston. She was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer during my senior year of college, yet insisted I move to New York City to follow my dreams—after all, they were once hers; she’d been the editor of a small journal before giving it up to raise my sister and me. 

I became intimately acquainted with the weekend schedule of the Chinatown bus to Boston. When I couldn’t be with Mom in person, I’d send her packages of books, filled with all the words I couldn’t bring myself to say to her.

During our one and only conversation about the fact that she was dying, Mom handed me a small, leather slip of a book her father had carried with him in Stalag 17 prison camp, where he spent nearly three years as a prisoner of the Nazis during World War II. I’d grown up with his stories of survival in Stalag 17 and Mom had, too. There was a strict curfew in the camps, but each night, my grandfather defied it to read to his fellow prisoners. My grandfather could have been killed by his captors for reading aloud, but in a landscape of so much death, his actions were a defiant reminder of life.

I had seen Mom take the book to her chemotherapy sessions. She had underlined one passage that reverberates across the decades: “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed… I will strengthen thee.” I don’t know if Mom read those words to feel closer to God or closer to her father; all I know was that they drew her out of her ailing body and into a place of hope. 

When Mom died, I inherited Grandpa’s book… alongside boxes of letters, declassified CIA documents, and newspaper clippings about a man I’d never met: my uncle Jack, who disappeared when his plane was shot down over Laos in 1972 during the CIA-led “Secret War” there. I’d grown up celebrating Grandpa’s service; my uncle’s had always been a mystery to me.

Through the words my grandfather left behind, I learned that he had devoted the rest of his life to looking for his son and died believing that his son still lived. I thought Mom and I shared everything, but I was wrong; even as she herself was getting ready to leave me, she was trying to protect me from the grief that had been hers. Mom lost Jack at the same age I lost her.

In 2013, still reeling with grief, I traveled to Laos in search of answers about the mystery that had haunted my family for decades. What I found in that jungle led me closer to the family I’d lost and the mysteries of a war that left Laos the most heavily bombed country in the world. 

On April 21, 2020, my first book, What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers—the story of my grandfather and mother’s strength—will be released. I had spent months planning the tour and had gotten blurbs from my idols like Salman Rushdie and Ron Chernow. There was a launch at The Strand’s Rare Book Room and stops at bookstores that I had experienced only through photographs—a limit that will stay true, for now. 

In quarantine, I’ve thought often about my grandfather in Stalag 17 and my mother, trapped in her body, both of them finding connection through books.

Tours may be cancelled. Libraries may have closed their doors, and brownstone stoops may have less free piles for the taking. But at the end of these long quarantine days, I have been logging into Zoom and Instagram Live and watching authors share stories. I’m slated to read at digital festivals as far away as Amsterdam and Australia. In our sleepless present, we have the incredible opportunity to read to one another out loud from within the walls of our homes, all of us waiting out the future together. Grandpa and Mom would have loved that.

What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers comes out this Tuesday, April 21, 2020 and is available in hardcover, eBook, and audiobook narrated by the author. It’s available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jessica Pearce Rotondi is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. Her work has been published by The History Channel, TIME, Reader’s Digest, Salon, Atlas Obscura, The Huffington Post, and Refinery29. Previously, she was a senior editor at The Huffington Post and a staff member at the PEN American Center, the world’s oldest literary human rights organization. She grew up in New England and is a graduate of Brown University. What We Inherit is her first book.

Connect with Jessica on Twitter and Instagram @JessicaRotondi or visit JessicaPearceRotondi.com.

 

WHAT WE INHERIT

“A beautiful amalgam of memoir, travelogue, and investigative report that moves with the propulsive forward energy of a thriller. A haunting chronicle of loss and redemption.” ―Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Alexander Hamilton

In the wake of her mother’s death, Jessica Pearce Rotondi uncovers boxes of letters, declassified CIA reports, and newspaper clippings that bring to light a family ghost: her uncle Jack, who disappeared during the CIA-led “Secret War” in Laos in 1972. The letters lead her across Southeast Asia in search of the truth that has eluded her family for decades. What she discovers takes her closer to the mother she lost and the mysteries of a secret war that changed the rules of engagement forever.

In 1943, 19-year-old Edwin Pearce jumps from a burning B-17 bomber over Germany. Missing in action for months, his parents finally learn he is a prisoner of war in Stalag 17. Ed survives nearly three years in prison camp and a march across the Alps before returning home.

Ed’s eldest son and namesake, Edwin “Jack,” follows his father into the Air Force. But on the night of March 29, 1972, Jack’s plane vanishes over the mountains bordering Vietnam and Ed’s past comes roaring into the present.

In 2009, Ed’s granddaughter, Jessica Pearce Rotondi, is grieving her mother’s death when she stumbles across declassified CIA documents, letters, and maps that reveal her family’s decades-long search for Jack. What We Inherit is Rotondi’s story of her own hunt for answers as she retraces her grandfather’s 1973 path across Southeast Asia in search of his son.

An excavation of inherited trauma on a personal and national scale, What We Inherit reveals the power of a father’s refusal to be silenced and a daughter’s quest to rediscover her voice in the wake of loss. As Rotondi nears the last known place Jack was seen alive, she grows closer to understanding the mystery that has haunted her family for generations―and the destructive impact of a family secret so big it encompassed an entire war.

 

 

 

 

 

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Category: On Writing