People sometimes ask me about the difference between writing and memoir. The difference is the existence of memory, the possession of memory.

Remembering the emotion around an event enlivens it, illuminates it, and gives the memory its significance. The memory may be vague or even wrong, but it nevertheless possesses important power because of the way it is remembered.

"I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start," wrote Virginia Woolf, in "A Sketch of the Past."

I have never forgotten my childhood art classes given by an Italian-American artist because the bohemian atmosphere of his studio was the antithesis of my bourgeois home in Providence. In his cave-like basement, Gino Conti urged us to create anything we wished with vivid blue, green, and red watercolors, even with our fingers instead of a brush if we wanted. During those hours I expressed my desires and dreams for sunshine and flowers while sitting on a little chair in a smock while watching from the corner of my eye the rabbits, turtles, and other wild creatures roaming around the shadowy space.


Even then I was drawn to a kind of freedom, one I have searched for all my life.