My book is getting published!

A very big update on my memoir, ALSO HERE.

Hi good people,

I got a book deal. Still can’t believe it. I got a book deal!

For the last eight years, I've been working on this book in one way or another: interviewing my grandma Goldie, transcribing her words, digging into research, writing, rewriting, rewriting again. ALSO HERE is a memoir about survival—how my grandma survived the Holocaust and how her story survived all that followed. I truly did not know the details of my family's history until I started writing about it. It's amazing what you can learn when you sit down and listen.

So, after years of receiving rejections, many of which helped me sharpen the book, many of which were just crushing, I finally got an offer of publication. A independent publisher in Canada told me they wanted to publish the book. I told the two other presses reading my manuscript and one got back to me with a second offer. (The other sent an out-of-office reply, followed by a rejection.) After so many closed doors, I now had two open ones. Two! My brother has a swivel chair in his living room where my nephews like me to spin them, and that feeling of stillness after turning in circles, that eerie unstable calm, was exactly how I felt staring at these offers.

All that to say: ALSO HERE will come out in December 2024 through Tortoise Books, an indie publisher in Chicago. 🎉🎉

I’m still pinching myself. Is this real? Have I stopped spinning? While I come to my senses, here’s an unofficial blurb on the book as well as a photo of me and my grandma leaning on a counter.

At 13, Golda Indig escaped the gas chambers at Auschwitz twice. It was a story she never told, in part because she never learned to read and write. As her youngest grandchild, I flew to her condo in south Florida to help sort through the confusion of the past. But when the memories came, they came as a stampede, neither of us ready to handle the onslaught of traumatic details, missing information and misremembered names. When we ran errands together, we lost each other in public, unable to think alike. Amid all our misunderstandings, I began to untangle the close calls and heartbreaking choices, how my grandma persevered through the war and after it too. ALSO HERE: LOVE, LITERACY AND THE LEGACY OF THE HOLOCAUST is an intergenerational Holocaust memoir on the echoes of silence, survival and hidden family history.

I can't wait to share this work with all of you. More to come, but for now thank you. Thank you for all your support, interest, kindness and encouragement. I'm going to go eat something now, which I know my grandma would appreciate.

Brooke