By the time my husband and I had separated, I was doing a PhD and immersing myself in reading memoir and personal essays, and one of my early inspirations was this short personal essay.
It’s not about alcoholism but it is about self realisation and self forgiveness after a lifetime of constantly ‘looking down’ after a terrible accident when Alice lost sight in one eye. And it’s a beautiful example of the playfulness of creative nonfiction, when she throws a poem right at its centre.
First published in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983
A Personal Anthology 