WWRN: "Reckoning with Kerri Arsenault's MILL TOWN" by Brady Huggett
The death of a parent, in most memoirs, would be the book’s beating heart. Initially, this also appears true of Mill Town, a recent hybrid memoir by Kerri Arsenault. In a beautifully touching moment near the end of her father’s prolonged fight against lung cancer, her mother guides him to the kitchen, her arms around his waist. He’s weak, on oxygen, and having trouble sleeping. His appetite has withered to almost nothing, and he’s suffering the indignity of a catheter. As they slowly make their way down the hallway, he turns to his wife.
“Ain’t much of a life,” he says.
This scene comes after many pages of Arsenault sleuthing around her hometown of Mexico, Maine, speaking with old friends, millworkers, and locals spouting conspiracy theories, as she tries to prove that the paper mill where her father worked has been poisoning the town. We have already seen her read aplastic anemia studies from the Maine Department of Human Services, access reports from the Department of Environmental Protection, and dig up the mill’s old OSHA violations. The implications of her father’s illness seem to move the book toward nonfiction exposé, in the vein of Eliza Griswold’s Pulitzer-winning Amity and Prosperity, about the fracking industry in Western Pennsylvania, or even Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, based on his time spent in Chicago’s harrowing meatpacking factories.
But Mill Town is not that kind of book. Arsenault can’t quite nail the cancer connection; in a chapter titled The Truth Lies Somewhere, she admits she is chasing something “that’s near impossible to prove.” She will never know if her 80-year-old father owes his death to his period of smoking, the asbestos he came into contact with at the mill, or something else. She writes that her father’s death is not “the center of this tale.”
Then what is?
As other reviewers have noted, Mill Town, at times, can appear discordant. There are pages tracing Arsenault’s family history and the migration of French Canadians to Maine for jobs in the paper mills. She writes about the lobstering industry, the food-insecure children of her hometown, and the local ski hill. At first glance, all these added elements can seem confusing.
But these are hints that Arsenault is concerned with something else, which reveals itself in Mill Town’s earliest pages, when she visits Mexico in 2009 for the funeral of her grandfather (another millworker). Her mother takes her into a “newish” gardening store, where Arsenault encounters a woman with “dry yellow bangs” wearing a “bulky sweatshirt” at the register. Arsenault doesn’t recognize her but thinks she should, and as they make halting small talk, Arsenault offers up that the town seems quiet, different than it used to.
The woman takes in Arsenault’s Prada eyeglasses, her expensive jeans. “Nope,” she replies. “You’re the one that’s different.”
It’s the initial evidence of a divide, and it happens to Arsenault so repeatedly on visits home that she begins to wonder about what now separates her from her hometown. She recalls a youth that felt boxed in by socioeconomics. As a teenager, a trip to see bustling, majestic New York City made her feel “a little embarrassed to come from where I did,” and she admits that Mainers like her tended to steer clear of “those smarter or more worldly than us because they made us feel small.” Her insecurity was confirmed when she went to college in Wisconsin and her new friends asked her to say specific words just so they could “laugh at my accent.”
Yet the woman at the register was correct: Arsenault has changed. Leaving the state for higher education expanded her mind. Then she married a man in the Coast Guard and they moved all over: California, Sweden, Curacao, Connecticut. Indeed, she has crossed some invisible delineation, and on her returns to Mexico the people of her hometown immediately notice. And they let her know about it.
When Arsenault gets caught up in the debate surrounding Nestlé’s plan to tap the town’s aquifer for its Poland Springs franchise, she receives an email from a Mexico resident telling Arsenault that she is “not really from here anymore,” and that she doesn’t understand the town’s needs. The wound is deep, and Arsenault is left to wonder, “Who are they to decide where I’m from?”
That is the book’s big question. Knowing Arsenault personally, I read Mill Town with great interest, but I also felt a sharp sense of recognition. When I was young, my parents moved us from Detroit to rural Maine. We did not have extended family in the town or even the state, and I was keenly aware that I had come from “away.” Like Arsenault, I left Maine for college and did not return. While the state provided me with deep friendships, shaped my sensibilities, and even how I dress, in truth nearly all of my bloodlines run through Michigan. I don’t think I was viewed as a true Mainer, and in my heart even I know I can’t claim Maine as my own.
Arsenault wrestles with similar questions around where a person belongs. For more than 300 pages, she paints us a detailed picture of her hometown. She has known Mexico, Maine, her entire life, first intimately from the inside, then from afar. She knows how her family landed there, she knows the migration patterns of the town’s mill workers, and the pride they find in employment. She’s felt the forces that pull folks like her away, and yet understands why others stay. She was born in that town, grew up there, and has laid loved ones to rest within its confines.
When viewed from this angle, Mill Town is less an exploration of the working class, or a cancer coverup, than it is an origin story. The book is Arsenault making a statement: this is where I’m from.
Mill Town is available for sale from Bookshop.org
Brady Huggett's fiction has been placed at Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, The King's English and Cagibi. He won the Macaron Prize in fiction for 2020, with Andre Dubus III as judge, and was a finalist for the 2017 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award and Boulevard's 2019 Emerging Writers Nonfiction Award. He is also an award-nominated journalist with Nature Biotechnology.
