Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir | 
so-soI know it‘s on me, but this just wasn‘t what I was looking for. I was hoping for a memoir, but this is a collection of five personal essays on somewhat random topics. It's all written with her sharp intelligent prose, and reads beautifully. And, reading her essay on being 80, you can't help but be struck by how mentally sharp she is as a writer. And she does have some lovely quotes. See comments.
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You are looking to supply the deficiencies of reality, to provide order where life is a matter of contingent chaos, to suggest theme, and meaning, to make a story that is shapely where real life is linear. 9mo
We can make a choice from accessible memories...but we can't choose what to remember. There is something disturbing about the thought that, if some other, hither to unavailable retrieval system were activated, I might find myself with a series of entirely unfamiliar memories - an alternate past that happened, but of which I had ceased to be aware. 9mo
What happens to all this information, this inferno of language? Where does it go? Much, apparently, becomes irretrievable sediment; a fair amount, the significant amount, becomes the essential part of us - what we know and understand and think about above and beyond our own immediate concerns. 👇 9mo