Writing shaped Julia O'Faolain's childhood. Both her parents were successful authors. Her father was Sean O'Faolain, the acclaimed Irish short-story writer – and director of publicity for the Dublin division of the IRA – while her mother Eileen wrote children's books, popular retellings of Irish sagas and folk myths. It's perhaps no surprise that Julia also became a writer; her best-known novel, No Country for Young Men, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1980 and in her memoir she explores what writing means for her while also recounting her eventful literary life.

Born in 1932, O'Faolain was educated in various convent schools, where she did well in Latin and French. Specialising in languages, she worked as a translator and teacher before she became a novelist and spent much of her life as an outsider in other countries, living in France and Italy and, later, on the American west coast, during the 1960s. As she sees it, the experience of being a writer is not dissimilar: a system of observation and translation. While she dicusses her marriage to the historian Lauro Martines, much of the book is taken up with describing her complicated relationship with her parents, and their influence on her life and career, sometimes explicit, sometimes less so.

Her memoir is peppered with cameos by notable figures from Irish literary life, including the various contributors to the Bell – the literary periodical of which Sean was a founding editor – people such as Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien; as well as Lucian Freud, who has a drunken exchange with O'Faolain in the toilets at Les Deux Magots, and Violet Trefusis, who threw the most lavish parties at her Florentine villa.

Throughout, O'Faolain writes with a conversational clarity and despite claiming to be more interested in other people's behaviour than her own, she is adept at bringing her memories briefly, brightly into focus before letting them fade back into time.