Memoir

Abstract

It is afternoon in a condominium in Westwood, Los Angeles, CA, a few miles south of UCLA, where I am writing this memoir. UCLA will be shuttered this Holiday Season from Dec. 21-Jan. 4. Faculty and staff are on mandatory furlough.I note these facts in the self-disclosure spirit of the memoir genre and to remind readers that, as Michel De Certeau put it,1 “historical writing is always embedded in a particular time, a particular place, a particular institution, and ‘rooted in a particular situation.’” These are the environs in which this memoir is being written – this time, this place, this institution, and in this particular situation.