When forty-eight-year-old Suzanne Chick discovers the identity of her birthmother, suddenly nothing will satisfy her but knowing everything.
Her mother was a nineteen-year-old girl named Charmian Clift, who went on to become a novelist and essayist whose name was known to thousands in the 1960s. But for all her talent, intelligence and extraordinary beauty, Charmian's life was marked by deep unhappiness, and ended in suicide in 1969 at the age of forty-five.
More than just a fascinating piece of literary history, this is a moving account of the consequences of adoption and Suzanne's search for identity.