'One life has many autobiographies. It depends how one sinks one's shaft of remembering...' Barbara Blackman's gift for the feel and weight and place of words, the music of words, draws us into her life as daughter, lover, friend, wife, mother, grandmother. She writes of the wonderful ordinariness of 'household things, children above all, dirty, earthy and high to Heaven things.' Her portraits of family and friends, many to become among Australia's finest artists, reveal both a delightful sense of the absurd and a great capacity to love.