Year of the Water Horse

A Memoir

Janice Page

A warm and witty memoir about the ever-changing relationships between mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters that traverses two continents and multiple generations of two disparate yet connected families.

Janice Page hails from Braintree, Massachusetts and a large Catholic brood. Her parents had a complicated marriage. Her five siblings each have their own sagas, and there is a destructive genetic force within the family’s blood lines that causes much heartbreak.

And then there is the large Chinese family of Janice’s husband, James, equally cinematic and sweeping with a rich and complex history of its own. There is a daring wartime escape, a lost child, immigration to a new world, and a bittersweet reunion after decades of separation.

Janice first met James fresh out of college while waitressing at Mandarin Garden, the only Chinese restaurant of its kind in Braintree. He had just arrived in America from Taiwan. As they work to bridge the divide between them—emotionally, culturally, and geographically—they begin to build their lives together. From Taiwan to Los Angeles, from her mother's bipolar disorder to the language barrier with her mother-in-law, Janice finds herself constantly searching for the feeling of home. Janice believes she can close the circle when she embarks on her own journey to become a mother. Like so many journeys, Janice’s own journey to motherhood is filled with twists, turns, and surprises, leading to a baby girl from James’s ancestral region of China. Janice and James might finally close a circle that had been open for generations on both sides and find home at last.

Filled with humor and heart, wisdom and healing, Year of the Water Horse is a profound and compelling story with a deeply satisfying ending that will resonate long after the final page.

Janice Page is arts editor at The Washington Post. Prior to that, Page worked at The Boston Globe, where she also published books in partnership with the Globe, including  the New York Times best-sellers Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy and Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice and multiple championship sports books on the Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox, and Bruins. She has also been on staff at The Los Angeles Times, The Providence Journal-Bulletin and written for The New York Times and Newsweek/MSNBC. A Boston-area native, Janice graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude from Rutgers University and was named the 2023 recipient of the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo, where she worked on Year of the Water Horse.

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Endorsements & Reviews

“A gorgeously written, truly funny journey of a woman through womanhood—motherhood, wifehood, personhood, full on adulthood. Page's sentences are crafted with care and they glide along with insight and joy and the precision you would expect from such a serious writer, even when she is not serious. I laughed a lot! Year of the Water Horse is a joy to read." Julia Sweeney, actress, comedian, and author of If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

"In Year of the Water Horse, Janice Page deftly illuminates the power and weight of family history across generations and cultures. Page takes us through the deeply personal journey of adopting a child while navigating the complex landscape of both her own and her husband’s family history. The author's desire to embrace but not repeat the past while creating a family of her own delivers a tender and resonant reckoning. Year of the Water Horse is a memoir that will leave you laughing through the tears." A.M. Homes, author of The Mistress’s Daughter, This Book Will Save Your Life, The End of Alice and more

"Janice Page tells a personal yet universal story about how we live inside the families of our childhoods and with the genes we inherit, and then carry our legacies forward as we create families of our own. We are invited to follow Page's complex journey to motherhood as she slowly learns the story of her Chinese mother-in-law's own painful past. These are hard stories but there is never a moment of self-pity or woe here—I felt uplifted during every moment I spent reading these pages. Janice Page's bravery, openness to new experiences, and appealing ability to find the humor in events will bring solace and inspiration to many different kinds of readers." Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point