Your relationship to objects could almost be called spiritual. I think of it myself as leaning against the given. This is a process of paying attention, of following impulses, of posing questions. In these matters it seems as if the object is leading the way. Firebird is your second memoir, but I imagine the experience of writing it was much different than that of Heaven's Coast.
Firebird begins with things that happened forty years ago.
Not that I was making things up, exactly, but that I was imagining into the memories, lending them detail and color. I could not have done so without all this time intervening. And I could not have done so without the mediating interest in the form of the book, in its language, which gave me something to pay attention to besides the painful material I was confronting. Chronology and comment might find a place in them. I wanted to place my family's arc within the social and cultural ambitions of the sixties.