Janiurek won the prestigious Young Writer's Competition at the Royal Court Theatre in London when she was just seventeen, and then went on to produce five plays before moving away from writing and London, with her young family. She went on to teach, and run workshops on creative writing, theatre and art, in schools, colleges, camps, and a women's prison.
But her story really begins after the death of her mother when she was a small child, and speaks of the men who came to define her life; she is the daughter of a Polish immigrant father, the sister of five brothers, the wife of one husband, the lover of several men, and the mother of two more. Her memoir speaks of identity and trying to find your place in a country that isn't your own, within a family that doesn't feel like your own.