Fiction

Coming soon

From Christmas to Christmas

Written by Shirley Obitz

A memoir. Where memory meets myth. Coming soon in print and on Kindle

Natalie, a prodigy child, loses her mother at a young age and builds a mythology around her mother’s life. Told from the child’s perspective, we follow the life of a mother and her young daughter, Natalie. The story traverses both time and place, moving forward and backward in time as Marie relays tales of her life to young Natalie. We learn of Marie’s Depression-era past in both Montreal and Detroit and how that shaped her radical political ideas, her dreams of being an opera singer, her down-and-out days in Hollywood sleeping in all-night movie theaters, the “modeling” jobs in the 1940s during WW2, her estrangement from her family, the lost years of the 1950s and the secret child she abandoned, to the 1960s and her radical political rants, her high-strung temperament which eventually leads to her break down—continuing to a quasi-semi-family reunion in the 1970s and how it destroyed her relationship with Natalie—chronicling the life of this mercurial figure whose deep family secrets permeate the darkness of Marie’s life, culminating in painful memories of loss every Christmas.