Borrowed Finery is Paula Fox’s memoir, now re-issued in paperback by Picador, of her childhood and adolescence at the hands of her sophisticated and savagely self-centered parents. The book is filled as much by their presence as by their absence, which weighs heavily and with great perplexity.

Fox is only a few days old when her parents in a foundling home in Manhattan abandon her. Her maternal grandmother finds her but, unable to look after her herself, places her in the care of an acquaintance, who takes Fox to New York’s Hudson Valley where she is handed over a few more times until she is rescued by a certain Reverend Elwood Corning, the Congregational minister of the aptly named Balmville. In the care of Uncle Elwood, as she calls him, Fox lives in a kind of Eden of gentle kindness and security, occasionally disrupted by the intrusions of Fox’s family. A visit from her rakish father Paul injects a searing glamour and confusion into the tranquility of her life. “The word father was outlandish. It held an ominous note. I was transfixed by it.” Indeed, despite herself she smiles and she recalls: “At some happy moment I lost all caution. When my father got on all fours, I rode him like a pony.” Then, just as quickly, he is gone.

A later visit to Provincetown brings Fox into contact for the first time with her mother Elsie, a bewildering presence who seems to have no feelings whatsoever toward Fox except irritation and occasional flashes of rage. Left alone with her mother’s things Fox writes of pressing her face into the beautiful clothes and playing with the cosmetics. When Elsie appears suddenly, questioning her, Fox begins to cry whiles Elsie exhorts her, “Don’t cry! Don’t you dare!” Fox writes, “I sensed that if she could have hidden the act, she would have killed me.”

This sentence in all its terrifying rawness typifies Fox’s writing: unflinching, avoiding melodrama, and letting the past and its feelings – remembered as vividly as if they had just occurred – speak for themselves. Indeed, Fox doesn’t try to explain whether Elsie would actually have killed her; the importance is in the truth of the moment, in the way that things are perceived, the way that characters (in real life and on the page) are built one moment at a time, in all their grimness or their loveliness or their confusing mix of the two.

Similarly Uncle Elwood’s person is revealed through this accumulation of moment and actions – one in particular brought forth with a clarity that illuminates Fox’s young life, and the book itself.

Uncle Elwood wrote his sermons and newspaper columns on an Underwood typewriter on a table that stood in the middle of his study. […] Except for an occasional clatter of typewriter keys there was a companiable silence between us. He asked me once, “What shall I preach about next Sunday, Pauli?”

“A waterfall,” I replied at once. I had just been thinking about a recent picnic we had on the shore of a stream fed by a small cascade whose spray dampened our sandwiches and us.

I can still recall the startled pleasure I felt that Sunday in church when I realized his sermon was indeed about a waterfall. I grasped consciously for an instant what had been implicit in every aspect of daily life with Uncle Elwood – that everything counted and that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.

Of course, as in a fairy tale, Fox is soon made to leave Balmville. Her grandmother, somewhat freed from her obligations to a rich and lunatic cousin in Cuba, comes to reclaim her. Thus ensues a most peripatetic life, at times with her grandmother, at times with her parents, at times in the care of total strangers, in New York City, Cuba, Hollywood, Florida, New Hampshire, Nantucket and Montreal. The same pointillist and unsentimental detail with which Fox captured moments from her earliest memory – thunderstorms bursting across the sky, hands hauling water up from a well – characterize her evocations of her burgeoning adulthood – a drunken episode with a boarding school friend, her first words of rebuke to her father, her bewilderment, as a teenage bride, at her first husband’s expectations of domesticity. Through this enumeration of instants, the book becomes a kind of search for the meaning of love.

On the one hand there is the gentle sureness of Uncle Elwood, on the other the utter inscrutability of Elsie. In between a whole array of moments reached for, or missed.

Fox’s remorse at not having used, in her guardian’s defense, the energy of words spoken as meant is piercing. But the book, after the fact, is proof of the power of words to testify about love and people’s goodness, rare as it may be, and to explicate, as far as it is possible, own’s own mysteries.

Borrowed Finery ends with a chapter, not named as all the others are after the places Fox lived, but titled simply “Elsie and Linda.” Years later Fox visits Elsie in Nantucket. They have not seen each other in thirty-eight years. Fox finds Elsie emaciated, bed-ridded, suffering from emphysema, but otherwise the same, as strange and chilling as ever. In an earlier passage of the book Fox reflects on her mother’s question to her, Did she love her? Fox reasons, “In some way I did love her, if an intense preoccupation with someone is love.”

That “if” slices with heartbreaking precision at the complicated knot of the question – and of the larger mystery, what is love at all?

Later still, Linda, the daughter Fox gave up for adoption at twenty, finds her. They write to each other every day for three months, they make arrangements to meet, they choose San Francisco, the city where they were parted. Of the first moments of their meeting Fox writes, “We spent two hours drinking soda, talking. I found her beautiful. She was the first woman related to me I could speak to freely.” On the same visit they go to the street where Fox lived when she was pregnant. Fox points out the windows of her apartment. She closes her memoir with these words:

I’ll leave us there, sitting close together on the curb. Now and then someone passed by but paid no attention to us as we told each other stories from our lives, falling silent every so often.

Here again, then, is, in Fox’s own words, the embodiment of Fox’s realization “that everything counted and that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.” Sometimes that feeling, indeed that thought, is love.