Jasmine Carrietté was born in Louisiana in 1933. After the dissolution of her second marriage, she entered Smith College at age 52 as an Ada Comstock Scholar. During her tenure, she was appointed a Smith Scholar, the only person in her graduating class to achieve the distinction. She also received a fellowship and studied Shakespeare at Gonville and Cauis at Cambridge University. Despite reassurance from professors and peers that she wasn’t writing merely about sex, that she was writing about “giving, and loss, and sex, and death, and self-abnegation, and self-oblivion,” her memoir has languished for decades. Not only have these been decades of huge social transition, but Jasmine's placement in that milieu also wouldn’t allow her writing to surmount the personal and social issues she faced. Now 83, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina.