num_pages: 240
description: The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writingThe memory that we live with . . . is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been.Memory and history have been Penelope Livelys terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her influences and formative years.Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Livelys life stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britains twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archeology the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journeyincluding a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach. She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands.
language: English
title: Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir
publisher: Viking