I Am a Red Dress: Incantations on a Grandmother, a Mother, and a Daughter

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The sad horror of this memoir is the silence of three generations of
women about continued sexual abuse. The abuse is shocking, but it is the
silence that stops the reader cold. Then we start to consider how the
experience of such things has slowly changed. Sexual abuse still exists,
but women now speak out about it.

Anna Camilleri is a writer and performer. Her memoir is a collage of
stories (with a few short but well-chosen quotes from other authors)
created over the years in different forms. The “incantations” are
neatly divided into generational sections, but continually shift focus
as the author writes of other sides of her life: an early crush on a
woman teacher, the humiliation of being a non-paying student in a fancy
girls’ school, the lusty high of cruising lesbian bars.

When all the pieces are in place, Camilleri has given us a private
sorrow and a public history of women dealing with abuse. Grandmother
kept silent, mother faced her abuser with a knife, daughter finally went
to court. In the author’s childhood, women rallied for change; in her
teens, she joined groups working to stop violence against women; at 20,
she watched two small girls play catch and later put them into the
eloquent story “Girls Run Circles,” in which she tells them that, if
they forget the good times, they should make them up, fill in the gaps
of memory “with dreams and longing and the imagination of a child.”

Camilleri has also given us a perspective on the growth of an artist.
Her own imagination, she tells us, is what saved her as a child, yet she
burned all her childhood stories and poems before she discovered she had
to write. In this affecting memoir, the creative exploration of her
personal story invigorates a familiar tale.