Meet Ellen Margolis. As assistant curator at the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory in San Francisco, Ellen records the testimony of Holocaust survivors before the War’s last witnesses vanish. Schooled by the professionals (her parents, her grandmother, the survivors themselves), Ellen considers herself an expert in emotional containment. But, when Ellen and her girlfriend Francine decide to get married, Ellen finds herself set upon by her own lingering ghosts. As the two young women beat their own early path toward marriage equality, Ellen's longing to plumb a legacy of intergenerational silence draws her into a clandestine entanglement with a wily Holocaust survivor--a woman with more to hide than tell--and a search for buried history. If there is to be a wedding, Ellen must decide: How much do you need to share to be true to the one you love? Set in ebullient, 1990s Dot-com era San Francisco, Paper is White is a novel about the gravitational pull of the past and the words we must find to make ourselves whole.
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“A beautiful, heartbreaking book about the stories that haunt us, about the ways silence can be wielded as a weapon and ultimately about how love between women can be redemptive. An important book.” |