This extraordinary autobiography of one of Australia's most celebrated female writers, Dorothy Hewett, traces the personal and political metamorphoses of her first thirty-five years. After university, several failed love affairs, an attempted suicide and a major poetry prize, Dorothy Hewett joined the Australian Communist party in 1945. Four years later she left her husband and moved to Redfern, Sydney with her lover, a boilermaker. Hers was a life of extremes: the pleasures and purgatories of a woman who has tackled everything placed in her path with a searing honesty, energy and intellect.