A poetic autobiography. Paula Fox, the great American novelist, has presented a book of memories from her childhood and youth, a moving and harrowing work. It tells the story of a child who is taken to an orphanage by her bohemian parents shortly after birth and then taken in by a poor but cultured pastor, Uncle Elwood. The parents sporadically appear: the charming, alcohol-dependent father who writes screenplays for Hollywood, and the mother, an actress whose coldness and indifference are so profound that Paula Fox wonders how she could have had a child at all. In the following years, the parents shuffle their daughter from one exotic location to another. In New York, she lives with her Spanish grandmother. In Cuba, she stays for a while with a distant relative, then she finds herself in Florida and then to...