Barbara Grizzuti Harrison supplies her own metaphor for An Accidental Autobiography—a collage she has made up from a tangle of silk swatches:

“… floral and geometric, reminiscent of Klimt, reminiscent of Morris, reminiscent of Braque … marbled, watered, paisley; silk postcards of … pheasants and peacocks and fans and lions and pagodas and lilies. …”

The unmistakable Harrison thumbprint. The most tactile, most sensuous of writers, she has always luxuriated in texture, color, scent, silkiness. No books are better candidates than hers for the title “My Five Senses and Sensibility.”

For Harrison to single out any one book as her autobiography seems gratuitous. No current writer has ever extended a more open invitation to read her work by the light of her childhood. In every one you feel the author’s self, always aware of the act of writing, always peering over her shoulder. As she has told us before, she was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, an unrelentingly parochial ethnic neighborhood where a smart Italian kid like Harrison was a freak. Only the Jews were supposed to be smart. When she was 9, her mother became a Jehovah’s Witness; it fell on the family like a ton of sour washcloths. The end of delight, which was now only to be found in Witness godliness. Reading about the hold of the Witnesses on her life (instead of going to college, Harrison lived in one of their communal houses, cleaning and making beds), it is crystal clear why she might want to spend the rest of her life reveling in the gifts of the senses. She was gasping for air.

An Accidental Autobiography is as much like jumble-shop browsing as it is like a collage. Harrison hasn’t called it “accidental” for nothing. It is arranged—charmingly—by topics, not in the usual straight, sequential line impossible to imagine for a writer like this. Harrison then puts the topics in alphabetical order. And why not, she says—you have to impose some sort of discipline on the floating associations of memory, and the alphabet is as useful as any other. So, not exactly from “A” to “Z,” here are the familiar Harrison preoccupations: places, meals, love, her childhood.

You don’t have to dig very far to get at the treasures. To my mind the first chapter, “Breathing,” is a small tour de force. Harrison was born in 1934, which makes her 60ish, just the age when people start suspecting their bodies of joining the enemy camp. By her own admission she has gotten fat. (Bless her, she doesn’t mince words. She is not “generous-sized,” “ample” or anything else.) Her beloved sojourns in the more polluted, picturesque parts of the Third World have wreaked some terrible havoc in her lungs. She needs a wheel-chair, she needs an oxygen supply. Now her gasping for air has become literal, explicit. She feels she has become a freak all over again. Out of this comes “Breathing,” which is—simply—beautiful. Funny, somber, gorgeously written, self-conscious in the sassiest, most crackling way, it is Harrison at her magnetic best. A reverie on death and illness, on getting old. On the pleasures of food and the perils of fat. On recognizing yourself inside the body’s cage. Even on the Fat Police of our time, the ounce-of-flesh Cotton Mathers who look upon every bite as the kind of moral failure all too familiar to Harrison from her severe childhood.

Like many another generous-hearted woman, Harrison falls easily into defining herself by the men she has loved. Or has detested, as in the case of her former husband whom she punishes (after all these years!) with the chilly sobriquet of “Mr. Harrison,” no more. How she satisfied her own, and everybody else’s, fantasy of young married love in the Beaver Cleaverish’ 50s is sharp and exact, monumentally angry. It may remind people of Sylvia Plath’s falsely cheery domestic letters to her mother just before she finally dropped the mask.

But the men she loves get full honor. Her high school English teacher for one. Here Harrison does something difficult, psychologically right on the mark. She recreates the slightly creepy quality of a middle-age bachelor, still living with his mother ready and willing for an inappropriate romance with his teenage student. At the same time she makes him as alluring as he must have been? seemed?—the intellectual older man who enriched her mind and put color back in her life.

Then there is her great love, a black, married jazz musician—she calls him “Jazzman”—who comes and goes. Here, too, Harrison is able to juggle his real, overpowering appeal with his role in her life as prolonged adolescent rebellion. After breaking up with him forever but never getting him out of her mind, she sees him as her bright angel of redemption when he reappears 35 years and many liaisons later, a little battered and broken by life. He can still rejoice in her body with its added flesh around the thighs, she in his with its paunch. Until they break up again. People don’t really change.

When I was 8, I fell insanely in love with Tarzan; when I was 38, the same thing happened with Leonard Woolf (long dead by then). So I am thrilled to find a soulmate in Harrison. She loves Lorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey for his grace and containment, for the easy respect he shows for intellectual women. She loves Red Barber, the iconic baseball announcer (for the Brooklyn Dodgers, her home team), as a truly virtuous man. She loves to pieces Frederico II (1194–1250), Holy Roman emperor, literary master, intellectual, conniver, enemy of popes, and like most love-sick women, she natters on about him just a little too long.

Nobody writes more swooning prose than Harrison’s, nobody is better at evoking the feel and smell of a place, or at creating the illusion that her heart is beating in yours:

“Every time I tell myself I want never again to be in Bombay, I have only to think of Warden Road and the smells of spices and flesh and fish and mangoes and yellowing paperbacks and milky tea and attar of roses and boiling ghee and fresh-washed khadi cloth and the filth and brine of the creative sea that laps the greasy stones of the seawall … even the mold, which smells like the bloom of a venomous plant. …”

There is so much to savor, to admire, that when she misses the mark it comes as a personal affront. You instantly become the Town Scold (“It’s for your own good, dear!”).

There may be a little too much nervous insistence on her intelligence and sexual appeal; well, you can forgive her—it’s like looking at old photographs and saying: “I was young once, smart too! Just look at this!” It’s when Harrison goes tone deaf that you really get bothered, when she no longer seems generous, free and pictorial but simply undisciplined. Or writing self-parody: “I am watching lean dark boys lounging in the port shadows of Anzio; yellow hummingbirds sip nectar from a purple jacaranda tree; an old lady under an avocado tree talks about her mother (dead), Plague Inspector for the port of Bombay a century ago. As long as consciousness exists, memory and its nuances exist (happiness exists); I cross over the threshold.” More often than you want to see, she veers close to Robert James Waller country—pumped-up, pseudo-profound mumbo jumbo.

There are other stylistic quirks than prickle like a splinter in your thumb. The freestanding ZOWIE! one-sentence paragraphs like “I hate masks,” “Heaven is the hell where Frederico is,” “It terrifies and saddens me how much I used to lie,” and the like. Far too many parentheses, as thick as weeds on every page, more (asides) than in Hamlet.

Still—and how she drives you back to the reviewer’s “still …”—you will want to share this book with your friends. Intelligent, funny, full of the wonders of the world, high on the Richter scale of nuance, some of the writing nearly as good as it gets. Maybe that’s enough.