Drawing on five decades of private notebooks, Richard Murphy has created a unique memoir of his life and times. Murphy writes about delicate personal issues as he chronicles the making and unmasking of a writer.

He includes amusing and moving accounts of his meetings and friendships, with many prominent writers and actors from the literary milieux of London, Dublin and New York, including C. S. Lewis, Harold Nicholson, J.R. Ackerley, Patrick Kavanagh, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Robert Shaw, Peter O'Toole, John McGahern, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.