This is a grim, tough, powerful, and beautiful book, the memoir of a genuine heroine, whose struggle against the calamities that beset her -- beginning with the wounds inflicted by a remote coldhearted father and a pathetically helpless mother and ending with the anguish of a wrecked marriage, the mother's suicide, and the author's own fatal illness -- was waged with enormous intelligence and fortitude, and even with flair. At the heart of the book -- and depicted with pitiless candor -- is the tortuous bond of love between mother and daughter. That at the end of her brief life, Janet Hobhouse could transform her suffering into a confession so precise and evocative and singularly unselfpitying, so strangely full of verve, strikes me as a considerable moral as well as literary achivement. -- Philip Roth
A stunning heartbreaker of a book, shot through with pellucid sadness...[an] extraordinary last book in which [Hobouse's] pain is as insistent--and lustrous--as her craft. -- Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times
[A] sad, beautiful--and profoundly affecting--meditation on love and death and family. -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
A sort of Jamesian journey through the labyrinth of the narrator's consciousness, a finely tuned, highly intelligent, witty, self--examining and haunted instrument...This is an intense tale, told at fever pitch. Grab your hat and hang on for the ride. -- The Boston Globe
