Ron Currie says his memories of the Franco-American community in Waterville, where he grew up, were becoming so distant he didn’t trust them anymore.

Currie, 49, was born at a time when people still spoke French, when workers flowed in and out of mills daily, and where French Catholic families filled churches on Sundays.

Now that those things aren’t as true as they once were, Currie decided he wanted to focus a story on Waterville and its French heritage, both as a writer and a native Franco-American son. The result is his latest novel, “The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne.” Focused on a tough but beloved Franco-American woman who runs an illegal drug operation, the book came out March 25 and has garnered national attention, including from NPR and The Wall Street Journal.

“I think most novelists, their instinct (when memories become distant) is to write your version of it, to get it down before it’s gone completely,” said Currie, who lives in Portland. “I’ve been circling around writing something about the world I grew up in for a long time. But stories, in my experience, don’t begin with wishes or with premises, they begin with character. And I didn’t have the right character.”

He found the character, Babs Dionne, partly in his memories of his own grandmother, who was not a crime boss. She was, Currie says, “a fascinating mix of toughness and love” and had a “sort of fierce-borderline-vicious love that was unique in my experience.”  So that contrast became the basis for Babs Dionne, who is both loved and feared for what she does and how she does it.

Currie will talk about his book at two events in Maine this month, and others later this summer. He’ll appear at the Waterville Public Library at 1 p.m. on May 17 and at the Raymond Village Library at 6 p.m. on May 29.

CONTEMPORARY FRANCO STORIES

The story, set about a decade ago, introduces Dionne as a proud Franco-American, a doting grandmother, a widow, and a vicious crime boss. She controls the drug business in the city’s Little Canada district, with the help of other women she’s known since childhood.

But drug sales are down and a higher-up drug boss sends an enforcer to Dionne’s territory to investigate. Around the same time, Dionne’s youngest daughter is found dead, and Dionne reacts with the violent fury she’s known for.

The book deals with the  idea of cultural and national identities, as illustrated by Dionne displaying herself as more of a Franco than an American, running her Franco-American enclave as she sees fit. It also deals with language, with Dionne and her colleagues continuing to speak French and wanting to pass the language down to younger generations. Currie notes that many Francos in Maine were pressured to assimilate and that French was banned at one time in Maine public schools.

Though French-Canadian immigrants were crucial in building so many of Maine’s mill towns — including Waterville, Lewiston and Biddeford — there aren’t many contemporary novels set in a Maine Franco community, with a Franco lead character, said Anna Faherty, archivist at the Franco-American Collection at the University of Southern Maine in Lewiston.

“I think it is unusual. More of the work we see tends to be set in historical periods,” said Faherty. “But there are some other writers, with Ron, who are trying to bring new takes on the different types of Franco-Americans and their different circumstances, good and bad.”

Maine author Monica Wood said she’s glad Currie’s book focuses on characters in a gritty Maine mill town, which are far less written about than the populations of Maine’s islands and coastal villages. She grew up in the twin paper mill towns of Mexico and Rumford, and thinks it’s important for Maine authors to show the rest of the country “we’re not merely Vacationland.”

“What impressed me the most, and it’s the same in all his books, is that the beauty of his writing is sometimes at odds with the darkness of the story, and that creates a dynamic experience for the reader,” Wood said.

WATERVILLE BORN AND RAISED

Currie grew up in Waterville, where his father was a firefighter and paramedic and his mother worked several jobs, including at the Hathaway shirt factory, as a waitress and a school lunch server. He said his childhood spanned Waterville’s transition from a mill town to a “dying mill town,” well before its recent comeback fueled by arts and cultural institutions.

He says his interest in writing began young, after reading Maine horror and suspense master Stephen King, and the science fiction of authors like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He said writing became a compulsion, something he couldn’t not do.

Currie’s first book, “God is Dead” (2007),  about God’s descent to Earth and subsequent death, won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. His 2010 novel “Everything Matters!” won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. His 2017 novel “The One-Eyed Man,” deals with the (then) new phenomenon of calling things “fake news.”

When Currie is not writing, he teaches creative writing at USM’s Stonecoast MFA program. “The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne” is the first of a three-book series. He’s also working on trying to adapt the book for television.

As someone born in Maine, who has lived here most of his life, Currie said another theme of his latest book is what he sees as “the problem” of rootlessness. Franco-American communities were usually places where several generations lived near each other, helping and nurturing each other. But nowadays it’s much more likely to find younger generations moving away, as fast as they can, which erodes the local community and feeling of the place.

“In the neighborhood and town that I grew up in, in Central Maine, the greatest ambition was to get the hell out as quickly as you could,” said Currie. “But Babs represents the exact opposite impulse, which is, when you leave the place you’ve always known, you strip yourself of power, in a way. ”

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