Born in Brooklyn, and transported to Ohio at a young age, Munro grew up as the eldest daughter of a dominant Modernist philosopher and teacher whose theories on child development and art permeated the household. "For a female child to grow up in the shadow of an intellectually confident father rooted in ideology can be baffling in ways hard to come to grips with," she writes. "For then she may be so alternately seduced and repelled by his ideas that there is little room left for thought not focused on him."

With insight, sweeping style, and growing self-understanding, Munro describes her romantic childhood, her painful years in the Paris and New York of the 1950s, and her tumultuous first marriage to one of the power brokers of the New York art world. More than an intellectual memoir, this is the moving and beautifully written saga of an emergent artist struggling to cast off a rich but burdensome past and find her own powerfully original voice.