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of what my life review was like, at pivotal points along the way. Maybe this will help you think about how to get started on your own life review.
FIRST MEMORIES
    I was two years old when my brother was born. My first memory is of my father coming back from the hospital with home movies of my mother, beaming, holding Peter in her arms. Watching the film in the living room of our home in Brentwood, California, was traumatic for me, at two. While going through a box of old letters I had saved but never revisited, I found a handwritten one from my maternal grandmother that read, “I shall never forget your reaction to seeing Peter in your mother’s arms. The tears streamed down your cheeks but you didn’t cry out loud.”
    I went through an album I have of my baby pictures, and I could find none of me in Mother’s arms. Only nurses with masks over their lower faces held me for Dad’s camera. I wrote about this in My Life So Far— powerful memories have a way of lingering. Mother had wanted a boy and must have been disappointed when I came along sans penis. I must have sensed her disappointment, the way babies can sense things. So when I saw the images of Peter in Mother’s arms, I think I felt I’d lost her to him.
    As I thought about this in my life review, I began to grasp where my fear of intimacy may have originated, and to realize that I didn’t have in either parent a person comfortable with emotional closeness. I could choose to blame my parents and make that my life narrative, or I could try to understand why they were that way, feel empathy for them, and set my sights on charting a different course for myself.
    I began putting other pieces of the puzzle of myself together, like a detective. I discovered that my mother had suffered from postpartum depression when Peter was born. Nothing was known about postpartum blues back then. This partly explained her two-month absence from home following Peter’s birth. It had nothing to do with me. Facts. Facts. But underneath the facts were the feelings, and I began to access those when I took myself back into the little two-year-old girl sitting on the floor next to the 16mm projector, watching home movies of her mother and baby brother. I could hear again the whirring sound of the projector. I refelt my painful feelings of abandonment.

    Masked nurses held me and gave me a bottle while Dad took pictures.

    I’m not so sure about the new arrival, my brother Peter, here in Mother’s lap with my half-sister, Frances, looking on.

    My mother, around age 34.
    I studied family photographs, honing in on nuances of expression that might provide clues, hoping to recover proof of love in our family, love that was so rarely expressed. Yet I could see it on my father’s face as he played with me, at one year old, in our pool. So he did love me when I was very little! But how glum I was in childhood photos with my mother, as though deliberately sending a signal for all who cared to pick up on it that hers was not the team I chose to be on. Compassion opened my heart when I noted the desperation in my mother’s eyes in the photo of our family posed to look as if we were on a picnic, one year before her suicide. Forgiveness began to creep into my heart, forgiveness of her and also of myself.
    I remembered how frightened I was of the noise of a motorcycle. During the Second World War, in the newsreels that would be shown in movie theaters before the main feature, Nazis were often shown riding motorcycles, so every time I heard one I would shout, “Get out of the way! Here comes Hitler!”

    Dad playing with me in our pool.

    Me around age two, making it clear to the camera that Mother’s lap was not where I wanted to be.

    Mother, Dad, me, Peter, and Frances, my half-sister. Dad had just come home on leave from the navy during World War II.
    I remembered the exhilaration I felt galloping bareback through the avocado groves in Pacific Palisades, California, unafraid, the Lone