“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.

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.