Chatterbox - by Barbara Worton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

To be seen and not heard was never going to happen for Barbara Worton, a.k.a. Chatterbox.

Talking, which she started doing in full sentences at fourteen months, is in her DNA. Her Italian American mother was a champion talker. Her German Dutch father had to be a listener. Her mother's parents and ten brothers and sisters all talked at once. Music, both recorded and live, played constantly. Life was noisy, and Barbara watched and cataloged what she saw and heard--then and all through her life.

As only a true chatterbox knows how, Barbara winds and weaves through stories from her Long Island childhood to life in the present. Each of her forty-three mini-memoirs paints a portrait of what makes the everyday beautiful, giving readers a wonderfully detailed glimpse into memories like being in her grandmother's kitchen (where making pasta sauce was almost a "military maneuver"). With wit and poignancy, she wrestles with the world's paradoxes and recalls moments that show just how much we all have in common.

Life spills onto the page in all its noisy, glorious, and messy detail. In Barbara's both intimate and chatty voice, her stories take us from Buster Browns and Tonette Permanents to supermarket lines, John Travolta, the Tappan Zee Bridge, and the sleepless nights of adulthood. You can see and hear the characters in these stories. Anyone who has a family will see something of themselves in this book. Anyone who loves spaghetti and meatballs will need to go out for Italian food after reading Worton's ode to both. Each story in Chatterbox: Stories from a Noisy Life is the perfect pause, a moment to refresh and presents a mirror for readers to reflect on their own pasts, presents, and futures.

"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." - Kirkus Reviews

Review Quotes

"Everybody has something to say in Barbara Worton's Chatterbox, her right-of-passage memoir. Barbara's cinematic writing takes us through the door into the kitchen and living room of her home in 1950s Long Island. You can smell the sauce, see the plastic slipcovers covering the furniture, and feel the fingers pointing at you as Barbara uses her voice to remind us of where we came from. Her family is our family, con voce or silently loud. It is personal as it is universal. Her essays are small touch points that trigger definitions for ourselves. It is a read to remember." - Rochelle Udell, Creative Director

"Barbara Worton's collection of stories is as satisfying and rich as her grandmother's Sunday Sauce. Her prose is bubbling over with sensitivity, wit, and humor. It will satiate you. Expect to leave her world feeling more connected to our own." - Joyce Markovics, children's book author

"As a filmmaker, I know the power of personal stories to connect people across all sorts of experiences, differences, and backgrounds. Barbara's stories have that power. They get in your head and get you thinking about your own life and what it means to be human." Anthony Amatullo, director/producer Surviving On LES, Peabody Award Winner Having Our Say

"Barbara Worton's collection of interconnected narratives, CHATTERBOX: Stories from a Noisy Life, tell the tale of a formative time in the author's life, written with humor, keen observations, and love. '... walls were quilted together from wood salvaged from a patchwork of boards from vegetable and fruit crates still bearing the Andy Boy and California Oranges stickers.' Worton places readers in her childhood site looking back and forward to stories of trust, relationships, and promises in her milieu: from her grandmother's home to the neighborhood." - Maria Lisella, author Thieves in the Family

"As if I wasn't seduced enough by Worton's stories of 'good girl cursive' and 'Buster Brown lace ups' and walking past John Lennon on a Manhattan street, along comes St. Christopher and that sealed the deal! Chatterbox honors the curious specificity that memory affords us. Readers are transported to a time of Buster Brown lace ups and Studebakers. Yet, alongside the humor and charm, live some critical questions about Worton's internal life as well as life outside her sometimes-changing body, mind, and community. This is a volume of recollections and musings that invite the heart and head to wonder, remember, and hope." - Kathy Curto, author Not for Nothing: Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood

"I felt like I climbed into the rumble seat alongside Barbara, for a breezy spin, outside-looking-in, at a passing lifescape of experiences, colorful to soulful; getting to see and feel a fine slice of a once-upon-a-time world through her wide eyes and vibrating inner senses. Just my kind of joyride; right to the last word. I loved how I felt like I was listening to each story as I read it, and could vividly picture each scene, and character, and imagine the voices and tones, and personalities at play inside each story, each well-shaped, remembered and a lovingly-preserved touchstone." - Colin Goedecke, Poetorialist & Guiding Spirit of The Poetisphere

"Barbara grew up thinking that "I have to be me. But why do I make so many mistakes?" The good part here is that the stories are compelling, amusing, and what were once mistakes were, in fact, part of growing up. Barbara became a terrific writer, unafraid to get out of her comfort zone, and succeeded on her own terms. Even though I am a bit older and Jewish, not Italian, I recognize the feelings and experiences of a mid-century woman wanting to be her own person, to be someone. Her. Own. Someone." - Barbara Lawrence, not-for-profit expert

"Barbara Worton's Chatterbox shines a klieg light on our common history, our shared insecurities, our universal regrets, our well-earned rage, and the humor that it takes to survive it all." - Linda Dini Jenkins, author Becoming Italian: Chapter and Verse from an Italian American Girl and Up at The Villa: Travels with My Husband

"Barbara Worton's collection of interconnected narratives... tell the tale of a formative time in the author's life... '... walls were quilted together from wood salvaged from a patchwork of boards from vegetable and fruit crates still bearing the Andy Boy and California Oranges stickers.'" - Maria Lisella, author Thieves in the Family

"The stories... in Barbara Worton's delightful, far-ranging collection are the outpouring of a writer who has been 'watching, cataloging, and analyzing' her whole life... You'll wish this chatterbox would never shut up." - Paul Genega, author of Outtakes: New and Selected Poems

"This is a volume of recollections and musings that invite the heart and head to wonder, remember, and hope." - Kathy Curto, author Not for Nothing: Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood

"Chatterbox is a deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures-a book I couldn't put down and will return to again and again." - Paul Rabinowitz, Founder ARTS By The People, author truth, love and the lines in between and Grand Street, Revisited