When Joan Ringelheim began to write, she had no intention of becoming personal. Since she is a philosopher by training, she kept thinking solely of intellectual essays. Then she read Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir and realized that the ideas about which she wanted to write were not separate from the experiences in her life and that she had to be transparent about what they meant. She could no longer keep the personal and intellectual separated as she had meant to do. The six essays in this book cover the parts of her life that were crucial in her struggle to meet the strange and the familiar: music and the piano, teaching, the Holocaust and women in the Holocaust, oral history, a trip to Sarajevo after the siege, and breast cancer.