An Accidental Autobiography

Explaining her autobiographical strategies, Harrison (The Astonishing World, etc.) writes, ""This isn't a digression. In memory, which is not hierarchical, there are no digressions."" Full of quirky tangents under whatever guise, her nonlinear memoir will enchant or infuriate readers, according to taste. Fully frank--or seemingly so--yet crowded with exotic and arcane allusions to decades of reading, travel, collecting, eating and loving, her story is also eccentric, dramatic, shocking, nostalgic, self-indulgent, pretentious, in places unreliable, ultimately boring. It is also repetitious, not only when Harrison looks back to her earlier books of memoirs and travel, but even within itself. She hangs chapters upon themes--housework, obesity, foreign places, illnesses, men in her life, lusts of all sorts. Harrison winds memories around them, from her pathetic upbringing in a Brooklyn tenement as child of a Jehovah's Witness convert, to a professional success hardly mentioned but symbolized repeatedly by a Manhattan high-rise apartment with rooftop pool. The same episodes, places and people keep turning up (some names are disguised). When her lists lengthen and proliferate, and she tucks in a chapter detailing her ""scars and distinguishing marks,"" the reader may sense a fatal fading of inspiration--or, alternatively, the ultimate in self-revelation. Beginning, before its flashbacks, in a pulmonary clinic and concluding with Prozac, Harrison's autobiography may be the most sophisticated book one reads this year, or the most solipsistic. First serial to Harper's; author tour. (June)