A Tell-All That Sees All : NONFICTION : AN ACCIDENTAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY.<i> By Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95, 396 pp.)</i>

Watch out for the kid with the pen.

We are now in the age of very personal memoir. What began as shocking revelations of abuse, lunacy or coldheartedness by children of public personalities--Gary Crosby’s “Going My Own Way” and Christina Crawford’s “Mommie Dearest”--has become a form favored by the literary offspring of more private parents. In “The Duke of Deception” and “This Boy’s Life,” Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, respectively, delineated the pain of their parents’ disastrous marriage. In “The Shadow Man,” novelist Mary Gordon exposed everything from her (formerly Jewish) father’s malignant anti-Semitism to the repulsive and provocative wet kisses she received from his toothless mouth.

Now it is journalist-travel writer-novelist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s turn to look back and tell all. “An Accidental Autobiography,” it should be noted, is painted on a much broader canvas than the works cited above. An impressionistic series of essays rather than a formal, chronological account, the book covers the author’s entire life, not just her beginnings. Still, stylistically and emotionally, it begins and ends with her parents.

There is nothing in Harrison’s Brooklyn childhood that can be romanticized. In the family’s kitchen, “roaches flew out of the oven when the stove was lit on those rare occasions a roast was deemed a necessity.” Her mother, a volatile, deeply disturbed woman, was a convert to Jehovah’s Witnesses who brought 10-year-old Barbara into the faith, forcing the girl to accompany her to meetings and on proselytizing missions, that is, forcing her to forsake her childhood. The mother’s motives in enlisting Barbara appear to be less out of fear for her daughter’s soul than out of a desire to fire yet another shot in the vicious, unending battle that was the Grizzutis’ marriage.

The author became both a foot soldier and victim of the war between her parents: “ ‘Tell your father,’ [her mother] said, ‘that I can’t sleep with him. Tell him I have a cold.’ I was 10 years old. I have forgotten to say how seductive she was. And how icy and how sorrowing. I told him. He beat me. She never--till death 70 years later did them part--slept with him again, or knew his flesh.” And what was her father’s role in this conflict? He was anything but the girl’s ally. He sexually abused her. He tried, once, to kill her.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison endured not just by her wits (which are considerable, as readers of her earlier works will attest) but by her passion. Her writing is marked by exquisite, sensuous imagery, by fierce judgments and witty epigrams: “I read Sartre in my late teens and made the mistake of taking him seriously.” She also possessed the survivor’s gift of moving beyond the horror of her own household and finding people who saw beauty and worth in her, and who insisted she see it as well.

The first of these heroes was her high school English teacher, Arnold Horowitz, depressed, agoraphobic, diabetic, 25 years her senior, with whom, at age 15, she began an affair of the heart. He introduced her to Shakespeare and Beethoven; they read poetry to each other. “At every school assembly, he came and held my hand. Everyone else stood to salute the flag. He and I did not. Jehovah’s Witnesses are not allowed to and he, with great courage and risk to his own safety . . . was determined not to have me feel like a freak.”

Part of Harrison’s talent, however, is her ability not just to see all, but to tell all. Thus, she cannot leave the reader with a sentimental, movie-of-the-week freeze-frame shot of Dewy Maiden and Mentor, hand in hand. She adds: “It may be more accurate to say: If I were to be a freak, he wanted me to be his freak.”

She found other--better--heroes as well. Listening to Red Barber, the graceful, gentlemanly sportscaster who offered the play-by-play commentary for all the Brooklyn Dodger games, lifted her spirit out of those dark, joyless rooms that were her family’s home and carried it into the sunny heartland of America. “Held by the magic of that voice, one suspended disbelief in happiness--even now, I can delude myself into believing that summers have never been so benevolent, so bright, so merrily green and happily rowdy as they were then.” Later, she fell in love, too, with Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers’ fictional detective, a nobleman both by birth and bent.

Her first real lover was not so fine: a horn player she refers to as Jazzman. She met him shortly after leaving her bleak, dead-end job as a housekeeper in the Brooklyn headquarters of the Witnesses and taking up the full beatnik life in the East Village. Harrison is less successful here in evoking this part of her life, perhaps because despite the seeming sophistication of the relationship--Jazzman was black, and married--the two of them seem more like stormy teenagers than adults. The elegance vanishes from her prose; it is not so much lyrical and passionate as simply adolescent: overheated, overlong.

Jazzman--who came back into her life in middle age--lies to her repeatedly. She, in turn, gets back at him by calling his wife: “ ‘Hello Mrs. Jazzman,’ I said, ‘did your husband tell you I was going to call?’ ‘Who’s this?’ ‘I’m about to tell you.’ And I did.” (While the author can forgive Jazzman at least some of his trespasses, she is less generous to her former husband, to whom she refers icily as “Mr. Harrison.”)

Harrison’s genius is excess. No matter what she describes--food, sex, travel, her own obesity and chronic respiratory illness--she renders it in glorious language. Too often, though, “An Accidental Autobiography” becomes mere lists, gorgeous words strung together: “Every time I tell myself I never again want to be in Bombay, I have only to think of . . . the smells of spices and flesh and fish and mangoes and yellowing paperbacks and milky tea and attar of roses and boiling ghee.”

But at her best, her language is in service to her art; her observations are stunning in their voluptuousness and precision: “I remember the way my throat ached from the trickling sweetness of the cherries I bought on the Piazza Sonino in Rome; and I remember the joy with which a Venetian woman, stealing days in Sicily with her married lover, drank orzato, an almond drink, ‘like liquid pearls,’ she sighed, her words interwoven with the suspiration of the sea.”

There are two miracles in this memoir. First, the miracle of mere survival, that Barbara Grizzuti Harrison emerged from her nightmare of a childhood to become a writer, a mother, a lover, a friend. And second, that after all the ugliness, she is still able to see so much beauty.