SOURCE: “No Accident,” in Chicago Tribune Books, June 30, 1996, p. 2.

In the following positive review, Dunford explores stylistic aspects of An Accidental Autobiography.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison supplies her own metaphor for An Accidental Autobiography—a collage she has made up from a tangle of silk swatches:

“… floral and geometric, reminiscent of Klimt, reminiscent of Morris, reminiscent of Braque … marbled, watered, paisley; silk postcards of … pheasants and peacocks and fans and lions and pagodas and lilies. …”

The unmistakable Harrison thumbprint. The most tactile, most sensuous of writers, she has always luxuriated in texture, color, scent, silkiness. No books are better candidates than hers for the title “My Five Senses and Sensibility.”

For Harrison to single out any one book as her autobiography seems gratuitous. No current writer has ever extended a more open invitation to read her work by the light of her childhood. In every one you feel the...