The events of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s life are the stuff of a good half-dozen novels. An intense childhood in a troubled Italian family in Brooklyn (a mother who demeans her and a father who tries to kill her); a long, bleak servitude in the Jehovah Witnesses from the age of nine to nineteen till her escape to the East Village to make a life of her own; first love with a black musician, the painful end of that affair (and its surprising reprise thirty-two years later); an unhappy marriage in exotic places that ends in divorce. With two adored small children she makes an independent life for herself and finds success as an esteemed writer. She suffers physical and psychological ailments that would undo most of us. Yet she prevails, traveling the world, interviewing celebrities, writing well-received books, and even living in a Park Avenue high-rise with a pool on the roof. It is the great myth come true: poor Brooklyn ethnic artist invades and conquers Manhattan (see John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever).

But don’t be put off by the apparent sensational confessional aspects of [An Accidental Autobiography]. The value of this memoir is in its artistic form. The true presence of the author is not in the record of events described, but in her language, her voice.

The story of a life is a desperate invention formed from the whirlpool of recollection and imagination. Though our lives are lived in the linear chronology of years, our experience of life is a palimpsest, an enormous collage whose pieces keep shifting as memory shapes them. There is a kind of law of indeterminacy in life, as in physics. Each time we think about our past, we change it. The author’s unique achievement in this book is not simply in its presentation of events but in finding just the right structure for telling her storied life. She has created a house of many levels and interconnecting rooms through which both the reader and the author wander. Each room provides a different view of what we see and feel, yet all views are true. The house is chock full of a vast treasure trove, like Citizen Kane’s castle, but all the crates are open and in full view.

Who we are is a question that may have no answer, but our thirst for an answer is what reading is all about. We try to enter another mind, another life, and compare it with our own. To see, feel, taste, or smell another world is a way of defining our own sense of ourselves. Only books provide this kind of detail. Music, painting, or film can move us deeply, but don’t provide the specificity of emotion and concreteness of lived life writing does.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s book is rich, large, varied, and passionate, but not, I think, immoderate or excessive, as some reviewers have said. She is only exhaustive in her desire and pursuit of the whole of her being.

And yet, despite the full frontal revelations and the moral bungee jumping—sometimes hair-raising but enormously satisfying in its spring back from the depths of life to the heights of art—something or someone is hiding behind the dense, baroque foliage of Harrison’s prose. There may be at work here (my Sicilian genes are kicking in) the deep Italian suspicion of too full a personal revelation that might deliver us into the hands of our friends as well as our enemies; the genius for “faccia figura,” of presenting a fine image to the world. Of course in our world, that fine image is not some superficial social ideal, but an apparent fearless honesty.

The most intriguing absence in the book is any discussion of what must have been a singular transformation in Harrison’s life: her conversion to Catholicism. She alludes to it throughout the book but never gives us an account. Is this simply because the experience is still too unformulated to speak of, or is this reserve a canny author whetting our appetite for a new book in the wings? I hope the latter. Catholics could use sensual, passionate statement of belief right now.

In the introduction to her book Grizzuti Harrison says, “I have been conscious of only one imperative, not to currupt the way my thoughts came to me by seeking to impose on them a pattern.” She has been remarkably faithful to this imperative throughout a complex book. There are moments when the flights of prose may land with a thump, and there are many moments when you simply want to know more and are not given any help. But I think even these apparent flaws work. That’s the beauty of the right form; it makes everything work for you.

Blake tells us that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and here that path brings us to a new, shining penthouse of art.