Deborah Levy traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her - including a letter to her dying mother and to an absent friend. The book illuminates and celebrates a rich and varied intellectual inheritance - and reflects on how it has enriched the author's own work. Taking in questions of mortality, language, gender, place, consumerism and everyday living, the acclaimed novelist invites her reader behind the curtain of a creative life, 'in which the position of the spoon is always changing'.