"We were a happy family - if you don't count the divorce, the drugs, the madness, and the suicide."

Kathleen Stewart has published seven works of fiction, a book of short stories, and two collections of poems, and has been widely admired and praised for her writing.

Yet nothing she has produced so far could have prepared readers for this memoir. Centred on the author's experiences in her last year at school, which included drug addiction, a feverish love affair, a suicide attempt, and a mysteriously calm interlude in a psychiatric hospital, it also reaches both back and forward in time in an attempt to come to terms with her father's successful suicide and with the presence of her brilliant, charismatic and utterly self-absorbed mother.

Written in prose of rare clarity and elegance, this powerful, heartbreaking and yet at times irresistibly comic memoir will remind some readers of similar depictions of childhood and madness by writers such as Raimond Gaita and Janet Frame.