June 2002

In this memoir, the Irish poet, drawing on five decades of private notebooks, has created a unique memoir of his life and times. Written with the personality of a diary and full of self-disparaging wit, his memoir takes the reader from a decayed Protestant 'Big House' in the west of Ireland to the colonial island of Ceylon, where, in the 1930s, his father was the last British Mayor of Colombo.

Murphy writes about delicate personal issues, including his own ambivalent sexuality, as he chronicles the making and unmaking 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 Harold Nicholson, J.R. Acherley, Patrick Kavanagh, W.H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Conor Cruise O'Brien, James Dickey, Kenneth Tynan, Robert Shaw, Mary Ure, Peter O'Toole, John McGahern, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

The book evokes people and desolate places on the west coast and islands of Ireland. With critical irony, enduring affection, and often with sadness, Murphy describes his experience at boarding school and at Oxford, where he studies under C.S. Lewis. Also included are disturbing memories of discrimination against Irish 'tinkers' and of mass murder in Sri Lanka, where he returned fifty years after leaving the island as a child. In memorable prose, this book records a strangely eventful life.