Growing up Glastonbury

In case you haven’t heard, I have a new book out. My Sister the Zombie is a YA mystery with a little horror thrown in, and it was a lot of fun to write. It’s also set in my hometown of Glastonbury, Connecticut.
 
Glastonbury has a reputation of being a lovely (dare I say pristine?), white collar, upper middle-class town. But growing up there wasn’t all ice cream cakes and money growing on trees. See, I lived on the outskirts, barely within town limits, and on a dairy farm to boot. While my friends’ parents were buying them shiny new clothes and cars, mine were advising me on the best way to get the lingering manure smell out of my hair. We didn’t have a lot of money, but what we did have was cows. And heart, I suppose. But mostly cows.
 
I spent the first eighteen years of my life in this town, enduring field trips in elementary school to my backyard, and farmer’s daughter jokes in my teen years. I got my driver’s license and my high school diploma in Glastonbury. And then I moved away as soon as I could, because I was a snotty teenager, and that’s what snotty teens tend to do as a rule.
 
A funny thing happened when I moved away, though. While I can’t say I loved growing up there, I found I was awfully proud to be from there. See, outsiders don’t care about the mortification you felt when a pack of rogue Holsteins escaped and planted themselves in front of your school bus (true story). Or those times you were teased because your clothes came from K-Mart instead of some boutique. All they know is that Glastonbury is a really, really nice town. And when I saw they were impressed, I’ll admit, I gained a new respect for my hometown.
 
When it came time to pick a setting for My Sister the Zombie, I considered my options carefully. I needed a place that would fit all of these requirements:

• It had to be in New England, because I needed somewhere humid in the summer that was also full of cautious and hard-to-crack residents.
• Both parents had really good jobs, so it should be an upper-middle-class community.
• The layout of the town had to be pretty straightforward and make sense, because I get lost easily, even in my own fiction.
• The townspeople had to be the type who would be politely horrified when a zombie moved into town.

 
Sure, I could’ve made up a place, but I already knew of a location that fit the bill to a T. And yeah, I could’ve fictionalized it, but I did that in my novel Ordinary Boy, and I continually find myself having to confirm to readers from Connecticut that their suspicions are correct, it is Glastonbury I’m describing there.
 
I thought it over. I wasn’t saying bad things about the town: it is nice. The people who live there are polite. And, for someone as geographically challenged as I am, using the town where I learned how to drive would be a relief, because I wouldn’t have to try and make a map. There are events that happen there every year—the Art Show on the Green, the Apple Fest—that would provide the perfect backdrop for some of the main scenes. So call Glastonbury Glastonbury, I decided. And I did.
 
I’ll be in Glastonbury this weekend for their “Read Local” Author Fair (Saturday, March 24, 2018, at the Riverfront Community Center, 300 Welles Street) from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., signing copies of My Sister the Zombie. I’m really looking forward to it, because as we get older, our memories tend to be more selective. Now when I drive through town, I think about the hours I spent at the truly fabulous Welles-Turner Memorial Library, or getting Chinese food at House of Tong with my sister (incidentally, not a zombie). I can drive by what is now open space, but what used to be the farm, and smile at the memory of rogue Holsteins making a break for Hebron Avenue. Because you know what? It is a nice town.
 
Here’s hoping they don’t chase me out of it with pitchforks on Saturday.