Video: Elisa Albert reads . . . – Chocolates for Breakfast

. . the scene with Miss Rosen from Chocolates for Breakfast

“Dammit, I am a little girl,” Courtney said suddenly. “And that’s what I hate about being with Mummy. It’s as though I’m the mother. I have to soothe her when she’s upset about having blown up at me, and I have to reassure her that she’s a good actress—you know, I’ve only seen four of her movies in my whole life, it’s enough to live with the parts—I wouldn’t know if she’s any good or not, but I tell her she is, because I like to make people feel good.”

Elisa Albert is the author of The Book of Dahlia and the upcoming novel After Birth. She read at Housing Works Bookstore, July 2013.

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Historical Editions

Since its publication in 1956, Chocolates for Breakfast has been translated into a dozen languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, German, Japanese and Swedish. It was a bestseller in the US, Italy and France. In the US, the Bantam paperback edition went through 11 printings and sold over a million copies in the 1950s and '60s. The 18th edition of the Italian translation, Cioccolata a Colazione, lists the total number of copies sold in Italy as of 1966 at 408,000. Cioccolata remained continuously in print in Italy through the early 2000s.