WRITING ON STONE: SCENES FROM A MAINE ISLAND LIFE, written by Christina Marsden Gillis, photographs by Peter Ralston, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, and Island Institute, Rockland, 2008. $24.95.

Does Maine’s slogan, “The Way Life Should Be,” extend to offshore locales such as Gotts Island? First settled in 1789 by Massachusetts native Daniel Gott, and located off the southwest tip of Mount Desert Island, the island measures only a mile across and 3 miles around and is no longer inhabited throughout the year.

For more than 40 years, Christina Marsden Gillis has spent her summers on Gotts Island, where the only means of transportation has always been a small boat out of Bass Harbor. In 1965 she bought a house originally owned by noted Maine writer Ruth Moore. From then on, Gillis came with her husband, John, a historian, and their two sons Chris and Ben. The boys spent many summers enjoying a place devoid of the electronic devices that have left ever less to the imaginations of youth.

Eventually, however, as young men, they sought adventure elsewhere. Ben became a pilot. Tragically, in 1991 he died at age 26 in a freak accident in Kenya when a bird flew into the cockpit of the small plane he was piloting for eight European tourists. Everyone perished when the plane crashed and burned. Seven months later, with a gravestone purchased in Ellsworth, the rest of the family placed his ashes in the island’s cemetery. Ben was thereby linked to earlier islanders, starting with Susanna Thurstin who died in 1811, a “name in stone.” Each time Ben’s parents and his brother – now married with children – return to the island, they wave as they pass the cemetery and call out “Hello, Ben. We’re back.”

Christina and John subsequently purchased their own plot in the cemetery near Ben’s grave. They were provided with a list of names of all who are buried there and all others who have purchased plots. The cemetery is “the central space” of an island that is itself “a house of memory.”

“Writing on Stone,” however, is much more than one family’s memoir. Gillis illuminates the island’s history, some of its leading figures, both past and present, and the structures and trails left behind and often deteriorating.

Utterly devoid of self-pity, yet terribly moving in its reflections upon the death – and life – of not just Gillis’ son but also of others who spent much time on Gotts Island, “Writing on Stone” deserves a wide readership by Mainers and non-Mainers alike. The photographs by Peter Ralston complement but do not interrupt the eloquently written text. In an era when memoirs are increasingly discovered to have been distorted, even invented, this is the “real thing.”