George Santayana famously said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The issue with this statement is that it is predicated on the fact that everybody shares one past. The collection under review reminds us that the past is not only communal but individual, as its strong subtitle suggests: “intimate” meaning “innermost,” affecting the very core of a person's being. What emerges from these pieces is that the composition of any community sharing experiences is fluid in synchronous and longitudinal ways.
Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti have assembled the best type of anthology. It offers a “collection of blossoms,” as the Greek term indicates, with a clear set of goals revealed in each piece. In the introduction, “Talking to the Girls,” Giunta and Trasciatti define their volume as “a multivoiced text . . . embod[ying] the voices of a large and diverse community that...