Dramatic, amusing, a little mysterious, Helene Cantarella was a person whose friends begged her for stories, and specifically for memoirs. Even in her nineties she was too busy to produce more than fragments, so at her death a younger friend took up her labor. Tracy, a storyteller in her own right, quotes extensively from Cantarella's letters and anecdotes. Their voices complement one another.
Cantarella, nee Paquin, was born in 1904 in New Bedford to prosperous Franco-Americans who sent her to board in a convent school from eight to sixteen, followed by a year at the Sorbonne. Later, at...