SOURCE: “A Time for Every Season,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 17, 1993, pp. 3, 11.

In the following review, Eder discusses several flaws in The Beginning of the Journey.

There is a time for memoirs. Some are premature—those written to record events rather than to transform them in the perspective of elapsed time and ripened character. Wait too long, on the other hand, and perspective becomes disassociation. The writer does not so much transform the memory as jab at it over the gulf of years, as though the subject were not himself or herself but a young intruder.

The time for memoirs is not fixed; it varies with the individual and there is a lot of leeway in it. Diana Trilling's memoir The Beginning of the Journey, dictated by failing vision in her 80s, contains much that is interesting and a number of passages that earn the overworked...