The story is fairly easy to describe: a ten-year-old girl is left behind in Manhattan when her parents go abroad to Italy on a tour to help the mother regain her health. Ruth Sawyer did spend a significant portion of her childhood in the New York she describes in Roller Skates, and indeed her parents did go on a tour of Europe during the summer Sawyer was ten years old. There may be some truth in this tale, but on the whole it’s a fictional autobiography, as with Jane Eyre, David Copperfield or Catcher in the Rye. The conceit of Roller Skates is that it’s a partial biography of the author/narrator, built on her childhood diary written in her tenth year.
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