When oral historian Ellen Margolis and her girlfriend decide to get married, Ellen realizes that she can't go through with a wedding until she tells her grandmother. There's only one problem: her grandmother is dead.
As the two young women beat their own early path toward marriage equality, Ellen's longing to plumb that voluminous silence draws her into a clandestine entanglement with a wily Holocaust survivor—a woman with more to hide than tell—and a secret search for buried history. If there is to be a wedding Ellen must decide: How much do you need to share to be true to the one you love?
Set in ebullient, 1990s Dot-com era San Francisco, Paper is White is a novel about the gravitational pull of the past and the words we must find to make ourselves whole.
Hilary Zaid is an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and the Tin House Writer's Workshop. Her short story "For Non-Speakers of the Mother Tongue" (Tahoma Literary Review, Winter 2017) has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and "The Dark Between the Stars" won the 2014 BLOOM Fiction Chapbook Prize. Hilary works as a freelance editor in Oakland, California.
