89 Years Young! New Hybrid Book Based on Author’s Pandemic Podcast Series

Three Chairs Publishing is honored to present From My Button Box: Collected Essays in a Pandemic Time by Judith Bruder.

Remember the joy of being held on Grandmother’s lap and listening to a story? Or being at home sick from school and getting to play with the buttons in her button box?

Judith does, and it serves as the inspiration for her new book, From My Button Box: Collected Essays in a Pandemic Time. Originally recorded as podcasts during the pandemic, the book is a collection of thoughts, memories, and musings pulled from 89 years of stories and conversations.

From its Introduction, “On St. Patrick’s Day,” that recounts the early days of the COVID shutdown, to the final reflections on “Waiting for Morning” and finding joy again — the 50 essays in From My Button Box are as colorful and varied as treasures in a button box, reflecting our tumultuous times while looking forward to a brighter future. Judith’s message is intended to reach anyone, of any age, who searches for meaning in our messy, glorious, oh-so human everyday lives.

As a bonus, each essay is accompanied by a QR code allowing readers to listen to the original podcasts, like this one called “For Memory’s Sake”:

Robert Braile, a former book critic for The Boston Globe, says, “There’s a gracious tenacity to these essays, an elegant insistence that meaning can be found amid loss, whether of a dear husband of fifty-eight years, or of sustaining companionship during a pandemic, or of a seemingly endless future in an octogenarian’s life.”

Judith Bruder, like so many women, has lived a variety of lives, often to her own astonishment. On college campuses she is a writer, a lecturer, and a scholar; a graduate of Wellesley College who has been a campus minister at Fordham University in Manhattan. At home she is a wife, mother, grandmother, and most recently, an unwilling widow. Brooklyn-born and Long Island bred, Judy loves foreign languages, knows a smattering of many, and feels at home around the world. Her interests range from English Literature and addictions counseling to cooking techniques, French conversation, mystery novels and the movies.

Her first novel, Going to Jerusalem (Simon & Schuster, 1979), offered a funny, quirky, modern-day Jewish pilgrimage to the land of Israel. Her second book, Convergence (Doubleday, 1992), was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which wrote: “Moving, funny, and poignant, Convergence is an autobiography of rare candor and depth.”

Currently Judy lives in a retirement community in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts where she gratefully and delightedly receives many visitors, old friends and new, a modern-day anchoress, or so it pleases her to think.

Published by Three Chairs Publishing just in time for Bruder’s 89th birthday, From My Button Box: Collected Essays in a Pandemic Time is available at Broadside Bookshop (247 Main St, Northampton, MA), from the Three Chairs Etsy shop, and from major online retailers.

PHOTO: Judith Bruder signs copies of her new book at a recent author event hosted by Broadside Bookshop. (Photo by Eileen Wynne Ball)