"The memory that we live with...is the moth-eaten version of our own
past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is
how we know who we are and where we have been."
Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a
career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given
listeners a glimpse into her influences and formative years.
Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Lively's life, stretching
from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the
sweeping social changes of Britain's twentieth century. She reflects on
her early love of archeology, the fragments of the ancients that have
accompanied her journey--including a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting
dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach. She also
writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she
now stands.