Review of The Butterfly Healing: A Life Between East and West

Verduyn confronts the issue of the invasion of the writer's privacy head
on. Engel, she asserts, assumed her notebooks would be read. 'To write,
and in particular to preserve what one writes, is to invite, indeed to intend,
readership.' Her selection represents about 70 per cent of the original
notebooks. Wanting to make a vivid and compelling book, she excised repetitive material and fragmentary and incoherent entries. But her deletions
were also determined by 'the argument of privacy for individuals associated with the subject: In particular she was thinking of Engel's children.