My parents were first-generation Americans, my grandparents Italian. Now, in Recollections of My Life as a Woman, she tells her story again. Moreover, di Prima pays far less attention to her sexuality and to her body, too, and that's understandable. Memoirs not only appeared in 1969, but also endorsed what might be called promiscuity. Prima doesn't want that.
Recollections seems to reflect the stormy road it has taken to see the light of day.
Sometimes it feels as if it's rooted in Mama Bear's News and Notes , the Berkeley newsletter for feminists, and sometimes it feels more like The New York Review of Books . At other times her language is right off the gritty streets of Manhattan. Then, too, Recollections seems like an odd mixture of candor and concealment. At other times, she draws a curtain across the rooms of her private life. Sometimes she isn't sure what did happen to her or why.