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White Walls

A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess In Between

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A memoir of mothers and daughters, hoarding, and healing.
Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk and layers of crumbs and dust; suffocated by tuna fish cans, old papers and magazines, swivel chairs, tea bags, clocks, cameras, printers, VHS tapes, ballpoint pens…obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity—one made of order, regimen, and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life’s biggest chaos: motherhood.
Confronted with the daunting task of raising a daughter after her own dysfunctional childhood, Judy reflected on not only her own upbringing but the lives of her mother and grandmother, Jewish Polish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust. What she discovered astonished her. The women in her family, despite their differences, were even more closely connected than she ever knew—from her grandmother Zelda to her daughter of the same name. And, despite the hardships of her own mother-daughter relationship, it was that bond that was slowly healing her old wounds.
Told with heartbreaking honesty and humor, this is Judy’s poignant account of her trials negotiating the messiness of motherhood and the indelible marks that mothers and daughters make on each other’s lives.
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    • Booklist

      December 1, 2015
      Raising a child is no easy task, but Batalion finds herself parenting her child as well as her own mother, who is a hoarder like her mother, Zelda, Batalion's grandmother. White Walls moves back and forth in time, from Batalion's childhoodinching through a home filled with fax machines, stacks of shoes, and the liketo her adulthood, including traveling the world and earning a PhD. She has escaped the hoarder's gene, she believes, and lives in a nearly empty Manhattan loft, married to Jon, oddly enough, the son of a hoarding mother himself. Here Batalion fears the items that necessarily will come with the baby, from cribs to car seats. Batalion writes in a clear, confiding tone, and her stints as a stand-up comic lend a graceful humor to her writing even as she is once again heading to her mother's home to ensure she will not, as threatened, kill herself. With her grandparents escapees from the Holocaust, Batalion ponders whether such great losses produced such great hoarders. She also ponders how to live, love, and be happy and sane. An absorbing, touching read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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