Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains

Throw away Hillbilly Elergy and pick up this amazing recounting of life and overwhelming death in Mexico and Rumford, Maine, home to a massive paper plant that actively employed and killed many of its residents. The author blends her love of her childhood home with her research on dioxin and other deadly chemicals released during the papermaking process. The (mis) fortunes of the two towns are completely tied to the mill and to the various companies that have owned it and how the owners decimated the Androscoggin River and the land surrounding it. There's also a fascinating history of Arsenault's Acadian ancestors, who migrated from France and Canada and were considered expendable and well suited to be obedient, work hard, and were show more sadly defeated when they finally rose up and went on strike against the dreadful mill conditions. The combination of the author's love of her hometown and her dread as she counts the cancer-related deaths is heart-wrenching. Even the dry bones of the endless bureaucratic denial of blame comes to life with her compelling narrative.

Quotes: “A kind of fatalism slipped unconsciously into our routines, transforming into a handing over of control to the powers that be. Silence is an accumulating force.”

“Sometimes our recollections can be suspect because memory accumulates actual events and muddles them with how we want them to unfold.”

“The meek will inherit the earth, Father Cyr told me, but he never said in what condition it would be when we finally assumed ownership.” show less

Another book that has been on my TBR for a long time! I was interested in it because as a child, we spent summers in northern Maine. I remember well the sulfur like smell that enveloped a mill town we sometimes drove through. I actually started this read a while ago but then got distracted.Somehow reading it now with all that is going on politically, it may be even more relevant than it was four years ago.

This well written nonfiction work is part memoir, part environmental expose part sociological study. The author grew up in a working class paper mill town in Maine where the residents were exposed to toxins and the cancer rates were high. That was the price they paid for steady jobs and a chance for their children to escape the mill show more life. As an adult, she goes back to investigate the various environmental hazards and political cover ups. She also explores her heritage, having been descended from the French Canadiens known as Acadians who were often discriminated against, called in an 1881 Labor report from Massachusetts, "a horde of industrial invaders”.

Winner of numerous prizes and accolades, this is very much an American story. There is a line that truly resonated with me “I simultaneously defend and disparage where I grew up, not because I’m nostalgic for the way things were; because I’m nostalgic for the way I thought they were.”

Don’t be put off by the exploration of Arsenault’s various ancestors, her personal experiences or some of the technical findings related to the environmental hazards.This book does go in different directions, but it is a worthwhile read and, as I said above, perhaps even more meaningful now than it was four years ago.

Thanks to #NetGalley and @StMartinsPress for the DRC. show less

This was a memoir along with an in-depth look at a number of environmental and sociological factors that lead the small towns of Rumford and Mexico Maine down a path of decline. The author mixed her own memories and family history (Acadian) with research into population studies and court findings in an effort to discern whether the pollution of the Androscoggin River was a cause of a cancer cluster and other health issues that beset the communities.
This book wandered through many related topics and was occasionally frustrating in its lack of resolution, but then I guess that was the point after all. The author describes the environment and the people with great clarity and sensitivity. This was clearly a personal journey and I show more appreciated the fact that she invited the reader along to get to know her hometown from inside out. show less

Everything is poisoned, paper mills are toxic waste factories, the government is lying (either outright or by omission) to us. Some people like reading tragic fiction, I apparently gravitate towards the real thing.

I found this to be a depressing but necessary read, especially being a Mainer. Now please excuse me while I go and Google dioxin...

Powerful. What starts as an investigation into Maine's "Cancer Valley" meanders, like a river itself, into personal narrative, local history, politics, activism, and more. Aresenault never promises answers, but this book will make you ask questions.

MEmoir/ History / Political Treatise... all in one package. I'll be honest, I picked up this book thinking it would be a bit closer to my own history of being in and around a mill town. In my case, the actual mill town was, by my time - roughly when Arsenault was graduating HS - , just a neighborhood of a larger County seat town it was founded just outside of around the same time as the mill Arsenault writes about. I know what it is like to live in such an area and have the mill be such an important aspect of your life, and I was expecting a bit more of an examination of that side of life. Which is NOT what we get here. Instead, we get much more of the specific familial and mill history of Arsenault and this particular mill and its show more alleged past and current environmental misdeeds. We even get a screed against Nestle along the way, and even a few notes of misandrist feminism. Also quite a bit of heaping of anti-capitalist diatribe, all tied up in Arsenault's own complicated emotions of being someone who cares about her home town, but who it was never enough for. (The exact dichotomy I was hoping would have been explored directly far more than it actually was, fwiw, as that is exactly what I struggle with myself.) Overall, your mileage may vary on this book depending on just how ardent you are in your own political beliefs and just how much they coincide with Arsenault's own, but there was nothing here to really hang a reason on for detracting from the star level of the review, and hence it gets the full 5* even as I disagreed with so much of it and was so heavily disappointed that it didn't go the direction I had hoped. Recommended. show less

This was an interesting and original contribution to recent works on rural America. The author grew up in (and eventually left, after a couple of young adult post-college returns) the eponymous setting of Mexico, Maine, a remote small town that was built around and whose economy still depends on an enormous paper mill. She returns regularly to care for her aging parents, and eventually starts to delve into the public health issues that the mill causes and the poverty that is still persistent despite a supposedly "good" employer in town offering many secure jobs.

I actually think much of what the town goes through and what Arsenault reports on is unique, and is not directly applicable to most other rural places. I say that because Mexico show more departs from the precarity of other "company towns" when it's clear their mill isn't in danger of being closed or moved offshore, despite many ownership changes. Also, the residents are almost 100% white (with strong Acadian ancestry) with few immigrants, which is increasingly uncommon anywhere in the US and was never true in regions like the South and the Southwest. But as a memoir, it was original and relatable. show less