by Peggy Rowe
First published 2020
Peggy Rowe opens her family album to reveal the chaos behind raising a future television star. She married John, a man who considers headlamps indoor lighting and uses workshop tools to extract toothpaste. Their household becomes a laboratory of frugality and mishaps. Woodstove accidents and garbage adventures shape young Mike's fascination with messy work. Peggy watches her son climb toward fame while she bakes cookies for Joan Rivers and mails fake fan letters to producers from different cities. John and Peggy enter retirement only to face lightning strikes and friends who mistake marijuana leaves for salad greens. They stumble into their own celebrity moments through paper towel and jeans commercials. Peggy navigates the distance between motherly pride and the strange world of fame her family enters. This memoir captures the ordinary moments that create extraordinary people and the love that survives both poverty and celebrity.
Genres: family-life, autobiography, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Period: Retirement
240 pages · Hardcover · Forefront Books