Can a memoir flecked with famous personalities—Frank Sinatra, Jackie Kennedy, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Mike Nichols, Carly Simon, the list goes on—be less of a name-dropping vehicle than an organic reflection of the memoirist’s vital and singular life? If the memoirist in question is Rose Styron, the 95-year-old author of Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart, the answer is almost unaccountably yes.
Her book traverses 50 years and many countries in the course of recording an enviably charmed life. Then again, charmed lives don’t just happen; they are created in part by the sort of people—rarer than one might think—who have a gift for riding halcyon moments to their heights and weathering the difficult moments with a certain sprezzatura.
