"Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me is a beautiful, moving, haunting, and funny memoir about what really counts. It moves deftly and lightly between the west coast and the east coast, and frustration and hope, with pointed, buoyant lines that make you smile as they pierce your heart. Made for You and Me is a memoir about great people (with great dogs, too; funny how that works out) and their great new son going through a rough patch with grace and wisdom. Caitlin and her family will realize many dreams. And in the meantime, rather than despair, they have given us a sublime gift of a book." -Scott Simon, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, is the author of "Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other" (Random House, 2010)

"There’s a story of this country that doesn’t get told a lot. Or told well. Of what it’s like to not make it. Of having to say to yourself, and to your spouse and your child ‘Listen, this isn’t it. We need to try something else. We need to start over…from the very beginning.’ Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me is that story. Resonant and richly detailed, it takes you deep into the personal heart of the beginning of the financial crisis and the recession that followed. Then, somehow, via Venice, California, backwoods Maine and 3000 miles in between brings you out the other end." —Kai Ryssdal, host of Marketplace

"If you have listened to Weekend Edition for the past few years, than you're likely to remember the story of Caitlin Shetterly —she and her husband decided to leave their home in Maine and pursue the dream of living in California. Unfortunately, the recession hit, and suddenly the couple found themselves without jobs —and pregnant. The pair had to trek back across the country to squeeze into Shetterly's mother's house in Maine, and Shetterly blogged (and spoke) about the journey (and her dwindling bank account) along the way for NPR. The Shetterly family was just one of many hit hard by the economic downturn, but her graceful telling of her struggles with money, health and optimism is as unique as it is universal." —NPR.org

"I thoroughly enjoyed the wild ride Caitlin Shetterly takes across America (with husband, pets, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and soon, child) in Made for You and Me, and the realistic, but hopeful, tale of a family's search for home. Caitlin is an honest and companionable writer and I look forward to what's next." —Melissa Coleman, Author of This Life is In Your Hands

"I read Made for You and Me in one fell swoop. It's a luminous, engaging, candid and often funny peek into a challenging (and all-too-relatable) American journey. Shetterly's voice is so smart, so admirably direct, and her account so rich in sensory detail, so terribly precise, it made me feel a sort of queasy empathy. Amazing. I didn't close this book until I reached the last page. I’m excited to see what Shetterly's got in store for us next." —Sarah Braunstein, author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children

"Caitlin Shetterly's lovely, moving account of her small family's journey to seek out and attain the sometimes elusive American dream will resonate with anyone who has had a tough time, and who hoped and tried hard to keep going." —Isabel Gillies, author of Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story

"In a world of uncertainty, we are offered a thoughtful pause, from a writer of uncommon resonance, heart, and verve. When Caitlin Shetterly and her husband, Dan, moved to Los Angeles, California, in early 2008, they never imagined they would be among those who would find themselves in a terrifying economic free fall--out of work, far from family, with options dwindling. In Made for You and Me, Caitlin's memoir of that time, she has written an open letter to all of us, mobile or rooted, about what it means to search for one kind of 'American Dream' and yield to another.

"Made for You and Me is a chronicle of change through love--sometimes painful, sometimes funny, often moving. What matters about this book is its revelation that what we think we want is not what we really need, which is family, community, and a meaningful life. This book will make many, many people feel less lonely in the world." —Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge and Finding Beauty in a Broken World

"Caitlin Shetterly has written an eloquent, thoughtful, and courageous account of a young couple in the midst of a devastating economic crisis. A sense of the present, here and now, is startlingly real, and a feeling emerges that this new generation is facing challenges we have not seen since the time of their grandparents." —Reeve Lindbergh, author of Under a Wing: A Memoir and No More Words: A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"With her candid, open-hearted account of dreams and ambitions waylaid by the Great Recession, Caitlin Shetterly has given us a chronicle of our hard times. Her young family's bewildering journey across the country and back again ultimately stands as a testament to both resilience and reliance. This is a beautifully-told story informed by a sharp eye and a generous spirit." —Jane Brox, author of Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History and Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

"With this twenty-first-century recession memoir, Shetterly is going to get a lot of feedback from those who have found themselves in similar situations. As she carefully documents in a book that provided the framework for a series of NPR Weekend Edition diary installments, she and her husband, along with their pets, hit the highway in 2008, looking for success in California. Leaving Maine was a huge risk for the young couple, but one filled with promise, especially with potential career advancement in the entertainment industry. Instead, they faced rental traumas, an unplanned pregnancy, and the dawning realization that the economic downturn was personal. Shetterly's willingness to address her own shortcomings makes for a deeply personal and riveting, alternately funny and poignant read. As the couple, new baby in tow, heads back east to the safety of family, she struggles to find the teachable moment in all that has gone wrong. Forget the Cleavers. Shetterly's is the new American family, and the faster we realize that, the better we all will be at coping." —Booklist

"In this compelling narrative, Shetterly reveals all the messy, mundane details of lives coming undone. . . . It's her observations on the reduced American lifestyle that give her commentary an edge. Readers would be wise to heed her commentary on the loss of our small towns, homelessness, joblessness and the increasing economic divisions between Americans."—Publishers Weekly

Author goes West to discover home in Maine

By Judy Harrison, BDN Staff
April 28, 2011, at 7:52 p.m.

Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home, A Memoir by Caitlin Shetterly, 248 pages, Voice-Hyperion, New York, $23.99 Hardcover

The lure of the West is strong in America

Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain and Harvey Milk, along with hundred of thousands of anonymous sojourners have sought new beginnings on the country's other coast.

Writer Caitlin Shetterly and her husband, Dan Davis, a freelance photographer, set off from Portland for Los Angeles in March 2008 for what they believed would be a new start in a land of sunshine and opportunity.

"There was no going back; just the shiny black macadam of unfolding change and new everything," Shetterly wrote in an early chapter. "We, like generations of Americans before us, were going west."

Less than a year later, they were driving east — a 2-month-old son and 90-pound dog in tow — to live with her mother in midcoast Maine. In 11 short months, they discovered what others, real and imagined, had learned before: joy and sorrow often dance together; the bonds of family are more supportive than careers or possessions; living more simply really can turn out to be a gift.

Shetterly's story may be familiar to regular listeners of National Public Radio. She sold several "radio diaries" that aired around the country to illustrate how the Great Recession was affecting young families such as hers.

Some readers may scoff at Shetterly and Davis' naivete. Others may feel she is giving voice to their own experiences. Few will question her skills as a storyteller.

"What I first saw were their feet: six huge, dirty, men's feet facing me in our headlights," Shetterly wrote of the first thing she saw as the couple arrived at the L.A. apartment they'd rented sight unseen. "Then I saw bodies. Hopper [the dog] started growling from the backseat and Dan said, 'There's someone sleeping in front of our apartment.' 'Someone' was a euphemism for 'many someones,' because it was, in fact, five people, three with their feet propped on our stoop."

That was the first in a long line of very bad luck that only abated, at least emotionally, with the birth of their son.

"[T]hrough some kind of unexpected grace I had confidence in being a mother, and the surety that I was good at this one thing surprised me," Shetterly wrote. "I didn't move to L.A. to find this out; motherhood had not been in my plans. Becoming a mother just when our lives hit every fan not only changed but also saved my life."

Throughout the memoir, Shetterly compared her family's own journey to the many moves described by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her "Little House" books. It seemed a jarring comparison at first since the Ingalls family's travails occurred in the 19th century and Shetterly's took place in the 21st, but her devotion to the metaphor will grow on readers who, even in middle age, cannot part with copies of their "Little House" books.

"Made for You and Me" ends in the fall of 2009 as the family moves to its own apartment in Portland, and Shetterly sells the memoir. Her husband is about to begin graduate school in Boston, her son is still an infant and the future remains uncertain.

Today, things are decidedly better, the writer said in a recent email. For the past two months, Shetterly has been promoting the book. Davis will graduate in a few days and is applying for teaching jobs. The couple's son now is 2 years and 3 months old.

Shetterly is not sure she will ever feel her future is entirely secure financially, but one fall day 18 months ago, at the age of 35, she found peace in an apple orchard.

"My life had come back to a kind of order," she wrote in the final paragraphs of her memoir. "I knew who I was, where I was meant to be. It was here in this place, with my small, brave family, that I found some kind of Eden. We had gone all the way to the land of milk and honey only to come home to this garden of abundance, this place made, it seemed, just for us."

Is it weird that Caitlin Shetterly's book made me slightly envious? Yes. Shetterly's new memoir, Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home (coming out this week from Voice) is the story of hardships — financial, familial, emotional — not usually the stuff that inspires switching places. She and her husband, Dan, set out from Maine to Los Angeles in 2008, searching for better opportunities, seeking not to defer their dreams. Instead, when they reached California, life (and the recession) threw countless obstacles in their path: joblessness and resulting broke-ness, an unexpected and physically complicated pregnancy, shitty apartments, loss of loved ones. And in 2009, with a two-month-old son in tow, they turned around and came home to live temporarily with Shetterly's mother Downeast. Made for You and Me describes their journey there and back.

Why would I envy Shetterly her miseries? I certainly don't want the bottom to fall out of my own precariously arranged life. I don't want to know the fear, desperation, or frustration that she eloquently describes in her book. But if those nightmares come true for me, I hope to emerge with my soul intact, as Shetterly did, surrounded by feelings of love and optimism. To learn, as she did, "that the bonds of family will sometimes support me more than my career."

I hope to find the Little House on the Prairie resourcefulness that allowed her to feed her family (plus two animals) on less than $100 a week — "which, when you're trying to eat organic because you're nursing is a major undertaking," she writes. "I had never in my life been this focused on my actual survival. There was a desperation and, also, an adrenaline kick to trying to pull everything together so that we could eat and keep our bodies going."

Let me be clear: I don't romanticize the harsh realities of not knowing if you'll be able to eat or pay your rent next month; for the most part, neither does Shetterly. She honestly depicts the meltdowns, marital spats, and mother issues that accompanied her experience — and I don't envy any of those. And she knows that she was luckier than many. She had a safety net in her family, who welcomed her with (mostly) open arms and supported her emotionally and logistically. She had a loving husband, a good education, and she knew how to bake bread. Not one of these factors goes unacknowledged. But still.

Of the ride from California back to Maine, she writes: "With Rain Man-like repetition and Rain Man-like rhythm I was saying over and over again, 'Our lives are chaos, our lives are chaos, our lives are chaos.' I couldn't help myself. Our lives felt like fucking chaos. Each time, Dan took a moment to painstakingly explain that when I went into this mode it made him feel like there was no air in the car." Nope, I don't envy that.

However, like thousands of National Public Radio listeners who appreciated Shetterly's audio diary, in which she described what she and her family were going through, I responded viscerally to her plight. (That makes extra sense in my case: Shetterly and I have some key traits in common — including the fact that she used to write a column, "Bramhall Square," for this paper; she's only a little older than me; we're both writers and actors; we're both in love with men who know how to work with their hands and take our, um, spirited emotions in stride; we both relish good food.)

And that connection is what inspires, if not envy, then at least deep admiration. Made for You and Me imparts a lesson our generation takes a long time to learn. Using the literal device of a road-trip chronicle, Shetterly illustrates how there is no map for this type of crisis. We must create our own, and it must include a home base.

"Over the pillows," she writes of her and Dan's last night on the road before returning to Maine, "I held his big, rough hand in mine and told him I loved him. I knew that for him the days to come were fraught with fear but that also what surged between us, like body heat, was deep relief that home again, home again, we were home." —The Portland Phoenix

 

 

 

 

"A redemptive story of how Caitlin Shetterly and her passionately devoted husband fought life to a draw in their coast-to-coast-to-coast odyssey. Kerouac would be proud. In fact he might be envious." —Peter Davis, Academy Award–winning director of Hearts and Minds

Catlin with Matty at home in Maine | Image © Daniel E. Davis 2009

"This cozy, homespun memoir blends a call to community ("until all Americans realize this—how much we need each other—[some] of us will always fall through the cracks") with a daily glimpse into one family's experience of economic hardship in a faltering economy . . . Through it all, the author found inspiration in the pioneer stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the lyrics of folk songwriter Greg Brown [and] the rewarding challenges of family in hard times." —Kirkus

"Caitlin Shetterly is not coy. In her memoir Made for You and Me, partially adapted from her pieces for National Public Radio, we endure her bedridden pregnancy and see her screaming at her loyal husband, Dan. Not surprisingly, Shetterly offers no tidy ending to the couple's rage against the current recession. But her honesty compels you to keep reading, even as your heart breaks.

Dan and Cait believed that moving from Maine to California would have nothing but benefits. Dan was ready to escape his full-time photographer job, and Shetterly—an actor who founded her own theater company—had her own creative aspirations. They both loved Los Angeles, and their friends were thriving there. In March 2008, Dan and Cait packed up their car and ventured west to seize the opportunities that surely awaited them.

But they couldn't escape reality—dumpy apartments covered with mold, Shetterly's unexpected (but cherished) pregnancy—and the recession finally wrapped its tentacles around their livelihoods. Almost overnight, Dan and Cait's security unraveled. Jobs were nonexistent. Funds ran dry. Eventually, the only option was to return to Maine and move in with Shetterly's mother. "I don't even know what I'd smash," an angry Dan says shortly before they depart. "It's all getting smashed for me."

Shetterly's honesty is an enormous asset, and it's not her only one. She's a personable and humorous narrator who turns her American tragedy into an examination on how love carries us to the next day. Her dreams flattened, her life in tatters, at one point Shetterly feels crushed. Then she looks at her infant son. "I knew I needed to choose life and hold on tight," Shetterly writes. For anyone still buried underneath the rubble of the economic collapse, Made for You and Me is more than a relatable read; it's a straightforward and unsweetened source of inspiration from someone who was knocked out by the American Dream but still keeps fighting." —BookPage

"I'm sharing this book with everyone I know. Caitlin Shetterly's Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home is a strong memoir about a young couple going broke in the recession and it gives readers the satisfying feeling of walking around someone else's shoes for 250 pages. We're all connected by some basic humanity and a good memoir reinforces this connection as we don the cloak of another with ease.

Caitlin Shetterly's Made for You and Me doesn't simply resonate for us at the level of humanity. It is us. Within the first few pages I learned we are the same age and as she discussed her career moves, life plans and even the love of her pets, I felt we were kindred spirits. Though this may be true, I must attribute this to Shetterly's writing style more so than the potential that we are long lost siblings. One key element she mentions after a few lengthy tales of her family pets is that writers often neglect the importance of pets in a tale, or even in a life. She refuses to subscribe to this and keeps her promise throughout the tale by consistently accounting for the pets' needs and whereabouts at every step of their journey.

The pets aren't the whole story, however. Caitlin Shetterly and her husband Dan Davis struggle through mid-thirties job searches, the want for something more, and the need for some basic success amid an economic recession that brings it all to a screeching halt. The pair is an example of the hidden layers beneath the CNN-drafted economic tag lines and phrases pundits regurgitate at us daily. They are the living, breathing case that represents us.

What's so endearing about this book is that not only do you recognize the story and eagerly peel back its layers, but you also come to feel the very real emotional stresses that television news stories are leaving out. Particularly moving in Shetterly's storytelling is her ability to frame her husband through the nuanced lens of gender expectations. These two critically educated people know that they're held to ideological gender standards and in many places in their lives seem to balk at the hegemonic practices that secure them. Yet, Shetterly's descriptions of her husband's transformation strikes at the very core of how masculinity is a powerful framing force that deeply impacts the psyche of men and women alike.

You feel for both of them, but what's moving the story is the way her gentle, honest tone captures the nuance we need to see in order to understand this is us, this is how we plan our lives, this is what we want for ourselves.

Shetterly frames the story around my childhood favorite, the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, Little House on the Prairie. Little House's Manifest Destiny, coupled with the lyrics of "This Land is Your Land," act as a critique woven throughout the story of their financial struggle, and her tale becomes a memoir with more take-away meaning than most. The mirror she holds up to us reminds us that the American Dream is complex, and that the drive within you has as much potential as a Horatio Alger success story as well as the potential to break you with exhaustion, crisis, trepidation and economics. It is this paradox that is particularly comforting and engaging about Shetterly's story. Her recession tale sheds light on more than just a tough economy. We often argue that the ideology of capitalism and the American Dream have been disrupted, and we do not live in the world, economic or otherwise, that our parents or grandparents did. Shetterly's work shows us that the resulting reality is complex and dynamic and many of us are struggling within it.

Basic ideas about family, support, goals, ambitions, and working hard are surely themes across the surface of Caitlin Shetterly's Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home. But Shetterly also takes those themes and moves them from trite assumptions about how we are to live and packs them full of the struggle they cause us, inside and out, when we're simply fighting for survival." —Elevate Difference