SOURCE: “Performing Artist,” in Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 14, No. 2, November, 1996, pp. 20–22.

In the following laudatory review, Stone examines the organizing principles of An Accidental Autobiography.

Most autobiographies are narratives, getting you from here to there in the author’s life. As such, they are implied explanations of how it all came to pass. An Accidental Autobiography gives no such account of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s sixty years of being alive. “A linear autobiography would falsify because it would cast things in a mold and present me with the temptation to find formal patterns where none exist,” she writes in the Introduction. If she created a pattern, she might imprison herself in it, she says, robbing her own memory of its diverse versions of her own experience, all of which are true.

How then to organize? “Memories gather around puzzles, passions and possessions,” she says. With these...