In my experience, when an editor says that, it's because they're looking for emotional reactions from the author to the subject matter... which is perhaps not what the main thrust of the story is to you.

Are you willing to revise based on that statement? Are you willing to attempt to figure out what it means to put more of yourself into the narrative? I know what you mean when you say you're writing about something that isn't about you... but I've also read things where I feel distant from the narrator, and those definitely don't always engage as much. (Of course, those thing are also generally fiction. Hm.) Creative non-fiction establishes a higher level of interaction with the narrator somehow. What I've read of this mss. feels pretty interactive to me, anyway. Good luck with the next steps in this process.

My assumption (and it's shared with my agent) is that this editor did not read too far as the book does get quite personal to me. I have a couple of chapters in particular where I actually write about my father's death and how it was timed to a plane crash in AK (one of my co-workers died in a crash the same week as my father). I don't write about my childhood or that kind of thing - but the book is only about a few years and I did try writing about what brought me to AK but that rang really false (as if it was thrown in there for effect).

I think we'll wait and see if it's a consistent complaint...

It is always so very difficult to parse an editor's comments—to know how far she/he read, to know whether a door is still open. But it sounds, Colleen, as if you know your book and that your agent is a terrific, fierce advocate for it.