Triangulations

by Lorine Kritzer Pergament

Overview

A young woman gains newfound courage after discovering diaries from her female ancestors who survived the Triangle Waist Factory fire and the Holocaust and went on to lead full lives. Susie, a fiction writer, is grappling with three issues that have been plaguing her: her inability to commit to her boyfriend Zach, who wants to get married and start a family; her frustration with her writing career; and the suspicion that exploring her family history may open doors to the reasons for her state of mind. When Susie returns to her childhood home for the holidays to help her stepmother and father, she discovers four family photographs that trigger her curiosity about significant events in the lives of her female relatives. She gains new insights when reading about her birth mother Sylvie, who died when Susie was born; her grandmother, who despite surviving the Triangle Waist Factory fire, went on to lose her best friend, as well as her infant firstborn son; her aunt Berta, a serious musician who faced anti-Semitism and misogyny. In the end, Susie comes to appreciate how difficult life is for everyone and begins moving on with her own life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781735027302
Publisher:	BookBaby
Publication date:	03/25/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	722 KB

About the Author

Lorine Kritzer Pergament's stories have appeared in Gargoyle, Bridges, and Penn-Union, as well as the anthology Amazing Graces: More Stories by Washington Area Women Writers, and she was a winner in the 2008 F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest. Lorine served as the Book Review Editor of Signature, a publication of the Women's National Book Association, and a member of the WNBA's Great Group Reads panel.

Editorial Reviews

"Lorine Pergament was a consummate storyteller. What she accomplished in this collection—a novel and four stories—maps a veritable family tree of laughter, tears, and human frailty. She inhabits her character's universal secrets, rumors, diaries, dementia, divorce, gossip, miscarriage, and deaths. Settings shift through time and space like emotional clouds, from Paris to New York to DC to San Francisco to Paris again. Her devotion to details is tactile. If hearts could talk, this book of life is what they'd whisper."
— Richard Peabody, editor, Gargoyle Magazine

"Triangulations, Lorine Pergament's first novel, is a gift to those who value a reading experience rich in storytelling, and rich in insight about life, love, marriage, sibling relationships, grief, and aging. Perhaps Pergament's greatest accomplishment is her psychological precision in dealing with a family's heritage of loss, beginning with the tragedy of the Triangle Waist Factory fire of 1911. Her empathy is boundless, and her ability to move from the elegiac to the edgy in a heartbeat is a revelation."
— Margaret Meyers, Author of Swimming in the Congo

From the Publisher