O'Faolain is a journalist, a literary academic, a TV producer and (in Ireland) a well-known pundit and columnist. She is also, very much, a woman: a feminist who is frank in her description of the encumbrances - and the valuable inheritances - of her upbringing. Vulnerable, humble, and warm, she pays (maybe more than) proper tribute to the benefits of her conservative, convent education as well as to the vagaries imposed upon her and her many siblings as a result of the failings of her errant, adulterous father (a famed journalist himself) and her beautiful, intelligent, but alcoholic, mother. She expresses without bitterness the slight emptiness of her youth with two parents each absent in their different ways, which - after honestly described forays into one doomed relationship after another - led to a single, childless, middle age, littered with subtle attempts at self-destruction in unrecognised imitation of her mother. She describes her own attempts to assuage and to understand herself through psychiatrists, therapy groups, drink, and, finally, through the love of those who know her - whether personally or through her writing.

To appreciate this book to the full you would have to be steeped in literary culture - and modern Irish literary culture in particular - but it is easy, too, to take this the other way around, and to allow O'Faolain to show the way into her world; each page is a bibliography in itself and her appreciation of the works which she describes has an infectious quality. This book will astonish you with the beauty and literacy of its prose and the accesibility and realness of its writer.