The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison's work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds - the actual and the possible - via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text. Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the 'flooding' of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory , ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge. If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.