Woonsocket:
the Lourdes of New England
Woonsocket: the Lourdes of New England (93,000 word manuscript), is a historical novel that Susan Choi called “juicy, brainy fun.” Set in 1928 in Woonsocket, R.I., and in Mussolini’s Rome, it’s the story of Gabrielle d’Avignon, a young French Canadian writer who will have to choose between her irreconcilable allegiances to her father, her lover, her nationality and the integrity of her work. Not unlike Marina Thwaite’s predicament with her powerful intellectual father in Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children.
Gabrielle’s ultimate goal is to publish her autobiographical novel in her native Québec. But in her Catholic province, all writers must first obtain the Church’s permission. She has no inkling of what the all-powerful clergy will demand that she expurgate from her book.
While she awaits her Church censor’s illusive blessing, she becomes involved in her father Edouard’s campaign to save their French Canadian parochial schools in Rhode Island. The battle sets Edouard against the assimilating zeal of their Irish American Bishop who threatens to excommunicate him and his followers.
Gabrielle’s struggles are imbedded in the deep-rooted conflicts of her French Canadian world and its untold story of exodus, from 1840 to the 1930s, of a million impoverished French Canadians to the mills of New England. This history was suppressed for decades in Québec, while in this country, generations of French Canadians were inculcated with ethnic shame. This is why their trials have been largely forgotten. And this despite (or maybe because) these events are far more recent than the seventeenth century of Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers, or Barkskins by Annie Proulx. As a Québécoise who immigrated to the U.S., I feel compelled to rescue this North American chapter from oblivion.
