SOURCE: A review of An Accidental Autobiography, in Commonweal, Vol. 123, No. 15, September 13, 1996, pp. 31–2.

In the following review, Antonucci urges the reader not to be alienated by the sensational, confessional aspects of An Accidental Autobiography.

The events of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s life are the stuff of a good half-dozen novels. An intense childhood in a troubled Italian family in Brooklyn (a mother who demeans her and a father who tries to kill her); a long, bleak servitude in the Jehovah Witnesses from the age of nine to nineteen till her escape to the East Village to make a life of her own; first love with a black musician, the painful end of that affair (and its surprising reprise thirty-two years later); an unhappy marriage in exotic places that ends in divorce. With two adored small children she makes an independent life for herself and finds success as an...