An Excerpt From Frances Badalamenti’s “I Don’t Blame You”

We’re pleased to publish an excerpt from Frances Badalamenti‘s novel I Don’t Blame You, out this week on Unsolicited Press. The publisher describes it as follows: “I Don’t Blame You is a young woman’s journey of losing her mother a mere two months before becoming a mother. It follows Ana through a year of going between her home in Portland and her mother’s home base in New Jersey as she battled cancer and as Ana grew a baby. The narrative begins with backstory around her mother’s early life being raised by a single mother in poverty in a Bronx tenement apartment and also her father’s early years in depression-era Brooklyn, both raised in challenging circumstances by Italian immigrants.”

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Sunday Stories: “Salad Days”

Salad Days by Frances Badalamenti On the night that Uncle Joe’s Tavern opened for the first time ever, I was asleep in my room. I had turned ten that day. My mother had our loud Italian family over for baked ziti and cake. We had just moved from a big four-bedroom house with a sprawling yard and a two-car garage into a nondescript one-bedroom garden apartment, even though there was nothing resembling a garden. There was grass and parking areas. […]

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