Triangulations

Triangulations follows Susie, a fiction writer who is struggling on three fronts. She cannot bring herself to commit to her boyfriend Zach, who wants to marry her and start a family. She is frustrated with her writing career. And she suspects that her family's past may explain the state of mind she is in. When Susie goes back to her childhood home for the holidays to help her father and stepmother, she comes across four family photographs. They awaken her curiosity about important events in the lives of the women in her family, and she turns to their diaries. These women lived through the Triangle Waist Factory fire and the Holocaust and went on to build full lives. Through the diaries Susie learns about her birth mother, Sylvie, who died when Susie was born. She reads about her grandmother, who survived the Triangle Waist Factory fire but later lost her best friend and her firstborn son as an infant. She also learns about her aunt Berta, a serious musician who faced anti-Semitism and misogyny. These stories give Susie new courage. By the end she understands how hard life is for everyone, and she starts to move forward with her own.