This first part refers to the formative influences of her childhood, and, as in many autobiographies, the clear, finished quality of childhood memory enables her to present this charming material with an authority the later sections do not fully share.
Most people have an impulse at one time or other to write about their lives.
Borne of a sense of the good luck, bad luck, strangeness or injustice of it, our wish is to warn others, or to receive their affection, or to present ourself in some good light, and maybe just not to forget, to make for ourselves a kind of elaborated diary entry, shaped and pruned. The professional writer, having the skills and, of course, a life of his own, is in a good situation to memorialize. Mrs. Howard's childhood was spent in a modest Irish Catholic family in a working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport. The ambivalence of the parents affects the author. Perhaps she is writing now about real life because art, which can embody and suspend ambivalence, does not always satisfy the need of the artist to confront and resolve her uncertainties.