In the following excerpt, Spacks discusses the influence of memory on the creation of Green's novel.

.. .The narratives of self-revelation that seem to issue from and speak to the vital imagination are marked by their air of restraint. Understatement can be as cliched as its opposite, but one must welcome a book that limits its opportunities for self-indulgence, assuming that in private as well as public life surfaces may suggest interiors more accurately than mindless introspection, and that form means more than starting somewhere and stopping some arbitrary distance further on. Two comparably compelling examples of fictional reminiscence are The Lizards—about an inarticulate Italian girl with an efficient lawyer mother—and The Dead of the House, a tale of a young American girl and her relation to a complex family tradition. In a prefatory note, Hannah Green comments explicitly on the novelistic relation between fiction and...