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A row with her Key West landlady involving potted palms and banana treees; hectic preparations for a dinner honoring a mystery guest (who turns out to be Salman Rushdie); her friend Annie Dillard's cancer scare; and her own mother's halting progress toward death—these and other events take biographer Rose (Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time, 1989, etc.) into a Proustian blend of social gossip (mostly of literary Key West) and a remembrance of things in her own past. The passing of time, the attempt to transcend it (in collecting antiquities), the need to create something original before it is too late, and the immense difficulty of doing so, are among the novelist's themes that resonate for Rose. Most affecting is her newfound appreciation of the middle-class suburban 1950s childhood she had long reviled: "I never `understood' my childhood because I never understood what a happy childhood it was." This encounter with her past culminates in a visit with her sister to their childhood home for the first time in 36 years. Unlike the fictional Marcel, who returns to Paris after a long absence and finds it much changed, Rose finds the house miraculously preserved, like a museum of her childhood, thus bringing no epiphany but merely the satisfaction of memories confirmed. Still, while there is much to savor here, there are disappointments, an occasional sense of incompleteness; we learn more, for instance, about the social hubbub over her dinner for Rushdie than we do about the writer himself.
Perhaps the best part of the book is its opening chapter, in which Rose, having overcome her own inability to penetrate Proust, explains richly how one can do so, and why it is worthwhile.
| Prologue: Our Hearts Were Young and Gay | 9 | |
| Chapter 1 | Reading Proust | 15 |
| Chapter 2 | TV Guide | 35 |
| Chapter 3 | Ancient Glass | 59 |
| Chapter 4 | How We Die | 83 |
| Chapter 5 | Estrogen | 115 |
| Chapter 6 | Skinned Alive | 139 |
| Chapter 7 | The Who-Needs-Mother Cookbook | 167 |
| Chapter 8 | Florida Landscape Plants | 197 |
| Chapter 9 | An Unwritten Novel | 229 |
| Recommended Reading | 257 |
Overview
You don't have to live through an unhappy childhood or a celebrity adulthood to write an autobiography. You need patience, an almost reckless candor, and a close-to-scientific pursuit of truth. This is what Rose learned from Proust, and she puts the hypothesis to the test in The Year of Reading Proust. Opening with a bravura description of the experience of reading In Search of Lost Time - which freed her to write about her own life - she goes on to describe experiences as ordinary as channel surfing and as remarkable as a visit to a hermit. In a work that's striking in its honesty, she writes about marriage, friendship, childbirth, and intimations of mortality. She tells the story of a failed romance and enduring