Author Sara Goodman Confino
Date: Sunday, November 10
Time: 10:30 am
Sarah Goodman Confino’s latest novel, Don’t Forget to Write, straddles worlds as well as centuries. It begins with a banishing, the result of a young woman’s brief seduction of a rabbi’s son. Following her very public embarrassment, Marilyn is given the choice of marrying the rabbi’s son or being sent to live with her great-aunt, Ada.
Marilyn is appalled by both options. There is no way she will agree to a shotgun marriage, and the only things she has heard about Ada make her out to be an unforgiving old woman. It’s 1960, and Marilyn wants to go back to college and be free of her stern father and her cowed mother, who lives under his thumb in ways Marilyn vows never to emulate, if and when she marries.
With no marriage in the offing, Marilyn is sent to Philadelphia, where Ada lives. Marilyn’s first impression of her great-aunt, beyond her wild driving home from the train station, is that she is all about rules: what Marilyn can and can’t do, and how she will be punished for doing or not doing. Even Marilyn’s lipstick is confiscated; Ada says that it makes her look like a “tart.” Marilyn envisions a long, cruel, prison-like summer.