An accidental autobiography

by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

When asked to describe this book, Harrison responds, "An autobiography in which I am not the main character." In her unconventional though never arbitrary approach, she writes about memory, and since memories tend to attach themselves to "things," she writes about collecting and acquiring them in a marvelous chapter entitled "Loot and Lists and Lust (and Things)." And since memories also attach themselves to people, in "Men and God(s)" she talks about men - those in her life and those she's wished were. She remembers the rooms of her childhood and adolescence in "Rooms: Signs and Symbols," and since memories are also housed in our flesh, she has written "Food, Flesh, and Fashion" and "Scars and Distinguishing Marks." Her own brand of experience with the women's movement is dissected in "Home Economics," and human frailty and illness in "Breathing Lessons."