Part II: "Approaching Neverland" Peggy Kennedy Interview

Approaching Neverland author Peggy Kennedy has been producing events in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 20 years, ranging from the Chinese New Year Parade to the Bay Bridge Celebration. She lives with her family in Northern California.

WOOF: Welcome, Peggy! Without giving away too much, because I encourage men and women of all ages to embrace for themselves your powerful memoir, Approaching Neverland, and its message, how were you able to even begin writing this book?

PK: So great to be with you, Diana! Writing our family’s story did indeed seem a daunting task. So I started with scenes from the past that were emotional hot buttons for me. Eventually, I was able to weave those scenes together, filling in details and dialogue. The interesting thing is that once I put myself back into a scene, I could hear in my head what my family members were saying.

WOOF: You’ve said that one reason you wrote your memoir was that you wanted readers to love your family, too. May I just say here and now, you had me at “Cannonball?” (Readers will just have to get the book to know what I mean!) Why was it important to you that others see your family through loving eyes?

PK: So often when we tell someone our story, they’re left with a shorthand version of the key people in our lives. I loved my family too much to have them forever remembered as “the bipolar mother” or “the murdered sister.” They were whole people with big personalities, humor and depth. I wanted readers to meet them, to know them as completely as possible, and love them.

WOOF: You’ve pretty thoroughly examined your formative and adult years, you’re a successful entrepreneur, wife and mother. What do you relish most about this time in your life, about being over fifty?

PK: I love that I’m now willing to fight for what I believe in. I make an effort to really enjoy my friends, family, and all the wonderful people that I’m lucky enough to meet. And I’m doing my best to grin as I hang on to this roller coaster we call life.

WOOF: In closing, I’d like to publically thank you, Peggy, for sharing your story. On a personal level, it’s helped me come to terms a bit more with my own childhood. As a tribute to both of our courageous mothers who instilled us with love in spite of their mental illness, I’m including their pictures. It seems so fitting that your mother, Barbara Jane Kennedy, (pictured left) and mine, Mary Elizabeth Richert, look so much alike!

And thank you, Peggy, for agreeing to this interview. Any parting thoughts for our WOOFer audience?

PK: Thanks so much, Diana. Talking with you has been a real pleasure. There’s no doubt in my mind that our mothers would have relished sitting down together for a cup of coffee and great conversation. You and I wouldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise! I would encourage all you WOOFers to write your own story. I’ll bet you’ll be amazed and gratified at where it takes you.



Interveiw with Diana Black

Approaching Neverland
A memoir of Epic Tragedy & Happily Ever After
By Peggy Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4401-2613-0
iUniverse, 259 pages

www.approachingneverland.com

WOOF for more stories about special women in our lives...

Part I: "Approaching Neverland" in the 60s with Peggy Kennedy

Let me think. What was it Jefferson Airplane co-founder said? Oh, yeah. “If you can remember anything from the 60s, then you weren’t really there.”

Well, don’t tell Peggy Kennedy. Albeit a young girl when the decade began, she was there alright, and she definitely remembers.

Unlike J.M. Barrie’s fictional character Peter Pan who enjoyed never-ending childhood, Peggy Kennedy, as she eloquently recounts in her candid memoir, Approaching Neverland, scarcely had time to be a kid.

September 1960: Five-year-old Peggy perches on a chrome chair, arms circling her cereal bowl. Fraught with first-day-of-school jitters, her feet nervously dangle above a zigzag sea of maroon, green and beige linoleum.

“She’s tired this morning,” her father says noticing Peggy looking for her mother. “She needs her rest.”

Heart heavy and hair tangled, Peggy stares at her Cheerios.

Arriving at school under the wings of four siblings, she lingers in the hall while her brother rakes a comb across her ponytail. In class, on best behavior, hands folded in her lap, she’s singled-out and escorted from the room. Her disheveled hair, it appears, betrays her family. It calls attention to the fact everything in the Kennedy home may not be as it seems. Peggy, however, knows the drill. She chokes back tears and the truth.

Home again, anxious to share her day, Peggy and her sisters and brothers are met with The Lone Ranger theme blaring, rooms topsy-turvy and their mother, Barbara, trotting around a “collection of objects, her head thrown back like an Indian circling a captured village.”

Thus the reader begins a powerful, chaotic journey with Peggy and her family through the veiled ravages of mental illness. Children quietly shuffled back and forth to family members. Hushed hospitalizations. Undisclosed attempts by Barbara to whisk them all off to “Neverland.” Once with near fatal consequences.

Such was the fate of a mental illness diagnosis 50 years ago. So little was understood by medical professionals, fearful patients and families knew only to secretly give it their best shot.

Best, however, does not trump loss. Peggy’s brave, beautiful and often humorous account of a family’s efforts to put the pieces back together, again and again, while continuing to endure more tragedy than anyone should ever have to, is a remarkable legacy to the people in her life and their capacity for love. Because, in spite of it all, time after time, even when love was not enough to change the circumstances, it triumphed.

Peter Pan’s youth was everlasting. Peggy, through a willingness to examine and move beyond misplaced childhood to life well-lived, also savors forever. Her closing sentiment in Approaching Neverland: “…sometimes, good things can last and last. And last.”

Review by Diana Black
NEXT TIME ON WOOF! Interview with Peggy Kennedy!

Approaching Neverland
A memoir of Epic Tragedy & Happily Ever After
By Peggy Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4401-2613-0
iUniverse, 259 pages

www.approachingneverland.com

WOOF for more stories about special women in our lives...