How much do we really know about the lives of our parents and the secrets lodged in their past? Judy Bolton-Fasman’s memoir, Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets, recounts the search for answers to the mysteries embedded in the lives of her Cuban-born mother, Matilde Alboukrek Bolton and her elusive, Yale-educated father, K. Harold Bolton. Readers will relish every step and stage of Judy’s investigations and will begin to share in her obsession to obtain answers to the mysteries that have haunted her life.
Join local journalist Judy Bolton-Fasman for her debut novel release in conversation with local author Helen Fremont. Judy and Helen recount the ways in which genealogical research unearth new discoveries about family history through telling their own journeys for answers to burning family questions.
Judy Bolton-Fasman is the arts and culture writer for JewishBoston.com. Her new memoir, Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets is published by Mandel Vilar Press and is available online at various book outlets, including bookshop.org. Her essays and reviews have appeared in major newspapers including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, literary magazines and two essay anthologies. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was the Alonzo G. Davis Fellow for Latinx writers at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts this past summer. In 2018, she was award the Erin Donovan Fellowship in Non-Fiction at the Mineral School in Washington State.
Helen Fremont’s new memoir, The Escape Artist, published in 2020 by Simon & Schuster, was selected as a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” new book. It was also chosen by People Magazine as a “Best New Book” in 2020. Her nationally bestselling first memoir, After Long Silence, (Penguin Random House) was selected by The New York Times as a “New and Noteworthy” book in 2000. Her works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and The Harvard Review.A graduate of Wellesley College, Boston University School of Law, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she has been a teaching fellow at both Bread Loaf and the Radcliffe Institute. She was a Scholar in the Women's Studies Research Center Scholars Program at Brandeis University and worked as a public defender in Boston, where she now lives with her wife. (Photo by Mikki Ansin)
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