Virginia’s Apple is a collection of fourteen literary memoirs that explore pivotal episodes across poet and writer Judith Barrington’s life. Artfully crafted, each one stands alone yet they are linked—characters reappear and, taken together, they create a larger narrative. The content is wide-ranging: the early days of the Second Wave of feminism—the exhilaration, the wildness, the love affairs, the surprises, and the self-invention, as well as the confusion and conflicts of those heady times; navigating a sometimes precarious existence as an out lesbian long before it was commonplace; leaving England and becoming an American citizen; finding a life partner; and growing old with an inherited disability. The author’s friendship with the distinguished poet Adrienne Rich is the subject of one story. In another, there’s an appearance by the notorious murderer, Lord Lucan, whose wife was a chance acquaintance.

These stories are laced with humor and joy, while pulsing below the surface is the slow unfolding of delayed grief over her parents’ drowning when she was nineteen, revealing how such a loss can shape a life.