As a novelist concerned with issues of gender, social class, and ethnicity, Jo Sinclair has won coveted literary prizes and a devoted following. Now in this extraordinary memoir, she relates a tale as fascinating and moving as any work of fiction.

In this unique instance of Sinclair's storytelling, she tells the story of her Jewish working-class life through the prism of an intense relationship with a middle-class Anglo married women, into whose house she moves so that she might write her books. Helen Buchman gives Sinclair a room of her own and persuades her to eschew alcohol for gardening and to believe in herself.