Local Author Explores Growing Up In New England In The ‘70s

Journalist Eric Gongola’s debut coming of age novel “You and What Army?” (Head of the River Publishing, 2024) examines what life was like for a tween a half century ago during the turbulent mid-1970s.

The story, set between the spring and fall of 1975 in an old mill town of tenements and idle cotton mills, is told through the point of view of 11-year-old Stevie Stepanek, a sixth grader whose family life is less than ideal. His father, Andy, is wheelchair-bound after losing both legs serving as a U.S. Army infantryman in the Pacific during World War II. His mother, Vivien, is a Virginia Slims chain-smoker with a wicked cough who nonetheless manages to keep the family on an even keel while working in a diner. 

But it is Stevie’s older brother, Paul, who sets events in motion. Paul has just returned from combat in Vietnam via a stint in a West Coast Army hospital. Paul is functionally mute and living on tranquillizers. We don’t realize how damaged he is until he sprints out of the house naked (except for his dog tags) to attack some Redcoat reenactors during a Heritage Day parade.

 “Given the physical and psychological wounds his father and brother bear from two wars, and the whirlwind of change consuming his world, Stevie desperately wants to play the hero,” Gongola said in a recent email interview. “So he finds a cause and, so he thinks, a way to make everything right. But he learns the hard way that the world isn’t so easily fixed.”

 Gongola grew up in New Bedford and moved to Harwich in 2019. He now lives in West Yarmouth. In 2000 he took a job as a page designer for the Cape Cod Times, where he also wrote columns on local and national topics. “Earlier in my career I had been a sports columnist, covering the Red Sox and Patriots on occasion,” he says. He also covered amateur and professional boxing, “which was like earning dual degrees in psychology and sociology.”

 He works as a copy editor at TheConversation.com, a nonprofit news site “that taps into the expertise of academics and researchers to explore just about every topic under the sun.”

 How does a journalist make the jump to writing fiction?

 “Like so many kids who fell in love with reading at an early age, I dreamed of writing a novel someday,” he says. But “facts paid better than fiction,” so he went into journalism. “When corporate takeovers and mass layoffs began to hit the industry about 15 years or so ago, I took some time off and decided it was time to see whether I had a novel in me.”

 And perhaps some stories are better expressed through fiction. “While I looked to other journalists for inspiration, I always found myself turning to novelists for fresh approaches and perspectives,” he says. “I was obsessed with Twain’s take on the difference between the right word and the almost-right word mirroring the difference between lightning and the lightning bug — and good luck finding those words on deadline.”

 Running like a leitmotif through the novel are the Red Sox. Everyone here is mad for the Sox that summer, when a ticket to a game cost $3.75.

 In fact, “You and What Army?” “started out as a love letter to the ’75 Red Sox and the innocence of childhood, but the journalist in me wouldn’t let the story rest there, and so it became something very different,” Gongola says. He finds the mid-1970s to be “fertile ground for storytelling.” Those were the post-Vietnam years, years defined by racial tension, Watergate, the Cold War and church scandals that would later be uncovered. “What did all of that look like to a kid? I had to find out, which is to say, I had to try to remember.” 

 And Gongola does remember. “Few elixirs in God’s green earth matched the restorative graces of summer vacation for an 11-year-old boy,” he writes. He captures the curiosity of the 11-year-old who really wants to know what the sketches in his brother’s pad mean.

 Like Stevie, Gongola was 11 in the summer of 1975. Which is not to say that the book is autobiographical. 

 “I like to say his story is a glimpse at my life ‘through the looking glass.’ Some of [Stevie’s] experiences in a New England mill town that has seen better days are very different from mine,” Gongola says. Gongola is grateful that what many of his readers “seem to agree on is that I’ve captured the feel of that unique time and place, which is beyond gratifying.”

 Gongola is now working on his second novel, which is about family vengeance — “sometimes perpetrated from beyond the grave,” he says. “It’s a nature vs. nurture story told on two timelines and explores just how much the past has a hold on each and every one of us.”

 Gongola will sign copies of “You and What Army?” on Saturday, May 24 from noon to 3 p.m. at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham.