Chatterbox
Stories From A Noisy Life
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Susan Schadt Press, LLC
Publishing:30th Apr '25
£17.25
This title is due to be published on 30th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
To be seen and not heard was never going to happen for Barbara Worton, a.k.a. Chatterbox.
Talking, which she started doing in full sentences at fourteen months, is in her DNA. Her Italian American mother was a champion talker. Her German Dutch father had to be a listener. Her mother’s parents and ten brothers and sisters all talked at once. Music, both recorded and live, played constantly. Life was noisy, and Barbara watched and cataloged what she saw and heard—then and all through her life.
As only a true chatterbox knows how, Barbara winds and weaves through stories from her Long Island childhood to life in the present. Each of her forty-three mini-memoirs paints a portrait of what makes the everyday beautiful, giving readers a wonderfully detailed glimpse into memories like being in her grandmother’s kitchen (where making pasta sauce was almost a “military maneuver”). With wit and poignancy, she wrestles with the world’s paradoxes and recalls moments that show just how much we all have in common.
Life spills onto the page in all its noisy, glorious, and messy detail. In Barbara’s both intimate and chatty voice, her stories take us from Buster Browns and Tonette Permanents to supermarket lines, John Travolta, the Tappan Zee Bridge, and the sleepless nights of adulthood. You can see and hear the characters in these stories. Anyone who has a family will see something of themselves in this book. Anyone who loves spaghetti and meatballs will need to go out for Italian food after reading Worton’s ode to both. Each story in Chatterbox: Stories from a Noisy Life is the perfect pause, a moment to refresh and presents a mirror for readers to reflect on their own pasts, presents, and futures.
"The stories… in Barbara Worton’s delightful, far-ranging collection are the outpouring of a writer who has been 'watching, cataloging, and analyzing' her whole life… You’ll wish this chatterbox would never shut up." - Paul Genega, author of Outtakes: New and Selected Poems
"Chatterbox is a deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures–a book I couldn't put down and will return to again and again." - Paul Rabinowitz, Founder ARTS By The People, author truth, love and the lines in between and Grand Street, Revisited
"This is a volume of recollections and musings that invite the heart and head to wonder, remember, and hope." - Kathy Curto, author Not for Nothing: Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood
“Barbara Worton's Chatterbox shines a klieg light on our common history, our shared insecurities, our universal regrets, our well-earned rage, and the humor that it takes to survive it all." - Linda Dini Jenkins, author Becoming Italian: Chapter and Verse from an Italian American Girl and Up at The Villa: Travels with My Husband
"Barbara Worton's collection of interconnected narratives… tell the tale of a formative time in the author’s life… '… walls were quilted together from wood salvaged from a patchwork of boards from vegetable and fruit crates still bearing the Andy Boy and California Oranges stickers.'" - Maria Lisella, author Thieves in the Family
ISBN: 9798989403462
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
120 pages