CHATTERBOX

Worton presents a collection of short essays featuring random, amusing, and often tender memories and observations of family and everyday life.

The author was born in 1949 and raised in Massapequa Park, New York, a village on Long Island with a predominantly Jewish and Italian American population. Many essays here offer reflections on a childhood and adolescence defined by the postwar culture of the late 1950s. One vignette describes Sundays at her grandparents’ house in Brooklyn, where Grandma’s legendary spaghetti and meatballs ruled the day at a gathering of aunts, uncles, and cousins; another piece focuses on preparations for an aunt’s wedding. “We were big singers, guitarists, and accordion players in my Italian American family,” she writes of weekly get-togethers, with popular music playing in the background of her recollections. With amusement, she reveals that she fell madly in love with John Lennon as a teenager. At another point, Worton also shares how, at age 7, she inadvertently cut off a sizable lock of her best friend’s hair while they played beauty parlor in 1956. There are also vignettes about her emerging political activism in the ’60s as she moved into adulthood. Taken all together, the essays create a vivid pastiche of mid-to-late-20th century Americana. Worton effectively tells her stories in a breezy style, laced with both humor and poignancy. There’s a steady confidence in her prose as she meticulously observes and comments on her own actions, the world around her, and occasional esoteric thoughts that have made a home in her brain, as when she whimsically muses about the uniqueness of her penmanship—a hybrid of cursive and block letters that, she says, allow her to put her thoughts down as quickly as possible: “My straight-up-and-down letters that spill out of my pen when I’m pressed up against the wall for an idea, fighting to get something out of my head onto paper, are a chubby, staccato printing and script mash-up. It’s not pretty or classy.” Overall, the essays, which pivot back and forth between six decades, are generally engaging, although a few wrap up without satisfying resolution.

Entertaining and evocative slice-of-life stories.