Michele Feeney: Like Home – Book Signing and Reading

Join us at the McClelland Library for a special evening with award-winning author Michele Feeney as she reads from her highly anticipated new novel, Like Home, and discusses the inspiration, history, and heart behind the story. In Like Home, Mollie Crowley Reid, a schoolteacher, lives in rural Michigan with her husband, Tom, a store owner and farmer, and their adopted daughter, Cecilia, an art student. In the depths of the Great Depression, Mollie receives unexpected news that impacts the future of her family and makes the threats to their economic well-being even more daunting. Facing these new challenges, Mollie fights to maintain her beloved career, her home, her health, and her family, all the while reaching out to help those around her as best she can. Cecilia, orphaned during the influenza epidemic of 1918, seeks connection to her biological family and her identity as an adult and artist. Tom, with sometimes crushing responsibility, fights to maintain his livelihood and mental health, make sense of turbulent politics, and extend compassion and assistance in his community. Moving between rural Michigan, the urban and university art scene, and the homes, trains, and gathering places that anchor community life, Like Home explores the meaning of family biological, chosen, and forged through hardship. Through trials of illness, financial hardship, unsettling times, and family displacement, they discover home is not a place but rather the people who choose to love and support each other through life’s unexpected turns. And family, they learn, is built on shared struggles and love. Michele M. Feeney is an award-winning writer, lawyer, teacher, wife, and mother of five. She divides her time between Arizona and Michigan, where her family still owns part of a Christmas tree farm homesteaded by her ancestors in 1850. After spending twenty years raising children, working, and writing whenever she could, Michele earned her MFA in fiction and nonfiction from Bennington College in 2022. Her creative work is rooted in the untold histories of rural families, women’s resilience, and the everyday courage required to endure hardship. Her debut novel, Like Family (2024), was inspired by a story passed down from her grandmother and imagines how one small Michigan community weathered the influenza epidemic of 1918. With deep personal connections to Michigan’s landscape and history, Michele brings a compassionate, historically rich lens to her fiction. Like Home, the second novel in the Like Family Series, follows the Crowley-Reid family into the Great Depression, exploring motherhood, illness, mental health, identity, and the struggle to keep a home, and a sense of belonging, alive. She is currently at work on additional fiction, including a third novel, and short stories, and a memoir about her friendship with a young man incarcerated in the Arizona Department of Corrections. Michele has attended the Bear River Writing Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, and has served as Assistant Editor for Narrative Magazine since 2017. She is a member of the faculty at the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law at Arizona State University and a practicing lawyer specializing in alternative dispute resolution.