BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Transforming a Childhood of Horror Into Literary Art : COLOR IS THE SUFFERING OF LIGHT: A Memoir <i> by Melissa Green</i> ; W.W. Norton $22, 341 pages

This searing memoir of a horrific childhood is not only a paean to the power of language, but a testimonial to the author as alchemist. Green, an award-winning poet, has performed a remarkable feat of transmutation, turning the base of metal of her experience into high art.

“I discovered that I could stop between the lines of prose the way one would crawl between the bars of a fence into a beautiful field, and I could find myself inside the story, behind its language. Like Alice through the looking glass, I passed through into another world where everything proved delightful and strange, and my real disordered life receded.”

From time to time, the reader joins the author in her fantasies and dreams, escaping a heritage of misery and anguish to soar away on a magic carpet of words. Long before her teens, Green has learned to create elaborate novellas, myths and epics: flights of the imagination that effectively remove her from the frightful actuality of her life and save her memoir from becoming a mere chronicle of wretchedness.

Just when reality seems unendurable, we’re treated to a fully realized historical romance, and can revel with the precocious author in a world where love is returned, virtue is rewarded and evil punished. Though the contrasts between fantasy and reality are stark, the transitions are remarkably smooth; a sort of sleight of mind.

In her brief prologue, Green indicates that she has overcome profound clinical depression, having lost entire years of her life in paralyzing despair. Trying to recall those blanks, she can only remember “shattering and a rain of fragments--razor blades; sleeping pills; hospitals; needles; restraints, people sitting near my cot, holding my hand, trying to give me the strength to come back from the dead; waking, not knowing who or where I was.”

Describing those years, she asks us to “Imagine a beautiful bolt of cloth laid out on a table where someone has cut out the pattern of a dress. I was neither the fabric nor the garment, but the place where the garment had been scissored out.”

The memories that she does retrieve are chilling. A frail, premature child, she grew up on a hardscrabble, isolated New England chicken farm, the daughter of a feckless father and an embittered mother whose every aspiration was thwarted by circumstance.

Although she was genuinely loved by her grandfather, her grandmother’s adoration took bizarre and perverted forms. Spirited away for weeks at a time to their seaside house, she was subjected to physical and mental torments, then returned like a parcel to her indifferent parents, never to speak of what she had suffered.

Once she was home again, there was nothing to mitigate her misery--no friends, no games, nothing but the relentless hardship of life on a failing farm with an invalid, alcoholic father and trapped, resentful mother. She was only 8 when she first attempted suicide.

Words saved her. In one of her dreams, obviously inspired by the tale of Hansel and Gretel, she breaks apart morsels of stony bread to find beautiful and mysterious words inside--amaranth, coracle, collet, glissade, girasol, lacustrine. In her dream, she carries thewords home with her, realizing that as long as she treasures them, she will never be lost.

Readers looking for titillation will not find it here, because these excruciating memories have been altered beyond recognition. There is abuse, alcohol addiction, self-mutilation, strife between Green and her sister; poverty, rage and hatred; the full shopping list of tabloid talk show staples, but neither a shred of self-pity nor the faintest hint that this book has been written for revenge or to settle an old score.

The ugly and unpromising raw material has been transcended, becoming something altogether different in the process. If “color is the suffering of light,” then literature is the suffering of the past. The analogy seems obvious and inescapable.