The privilege of reading a memoir is the privilege of being close to the heart of the story of another person's life. In a psychoanalytic treatment, within the privacy and intimacy afforded by the psychoanalytic space created with our patient, we are similarly privileged to be close to the heart of a human story as, with our participation, the story unfolds and reaches toward deeper understanding and partial resolution. Either experience can offer us internal resonances, the chance to be moved and to learn through proximity to the story of another person's life. It is this kind of privilege that Madelon Sprengnether offers us in her new memoir, Great River Road.

Sprengnether's memoir is a literary narrative that depicts her efforts to build an integrated life narrative. It is a quest made particularly challenging by the devastating childhood experience of the accidental drowning of her beloved father. At the time, the author was just nine years old, and the drowning occurred in her presence and in that of her mother and