“BEFORE memory fades completely, I have a few things I want to say,” writes Margaret Randall in this memoir – and what she has to say is certainly of great interest.

[[{"fid":"18202","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]A poet, oral historian, essayist and translator, she has produced over 150 books and, although she has written about her life before, I Never Left Home is her assessment of it now from the perspective of her 83 years.
 
Determined to be creative and free from the restrictions of the conventional life her parents envisaged for her, in the early 1960s Randall joined the New York arts scene and went on to found a leftist arts journal in Mexico before fleeing the country without a passport in a refrigerated meat truck.

She lived in Cuba during the 1970s, then moved to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas in the 1980s and, along the way, collaborated with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Haydee Santamaria, Gunther Grass, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Graham Greene and Eduardo Galeano. She raised four children and realised she was a lesbian.

Through storytelling, reflection and justifications for her life choices, hers is an exhilarating and bumpy ride through some interesting times and places and the cultures and politics she encountered, in which she attempts to capture her original impressions as well as expanding on her current views.

Randall is one of the foremost writers of oral histories of women involved in revolutionary struggle in Cuba and Nicaragua and over the years she has developed a gender-analysis of society which sits uneasily with the revolutionary socialist views of her youth.

As Jody Sokolower puts it in her review of Randall’s book To Change the World: My Years in Cuba, “Randall is too much of a feminist for the socialists and too much of a socialist for the feminists.”

Running through the memoir are reflections on the nature of power in personal relationships and between and within nations.

Randall’s initial enthusiasm for the ideals of socialism has not carried forward into any great support for socialism in practice, with all its inevitable complexities and difficulties. Posing the idea that revolutionary male leaders refuse to tackle the issue of power, she asks the question: “How can socialist countries make the transition from state control to a socialism that is truly democratic, allowing for diverse opinions and individual creativity?”

Unlike most progressives who support the current struggle of Nicaragua to defend the gains of its revolution, Randall has distanced herself from its government, although she has maintained links with the Cuban literary scene, where she is highly regarded.

For anyone with a radical feminist perspective of society, there will be much to agree with in this memoir. For others, it is a complex reappraisal of fascinating times and places that shaped one woman’s thinking.

I Never Left Home is published by Duke University Press, £25.99