So many of us will share Ann Fieldhouses emotional turmoil as she works her way through her childhood experiences and emerges as her real self - receptive, positive, reflective, and no longer reliant on the props that saw her through her first marriage, and saw her move from Manchester to London and finally to rural Berkshire in her quest for balance and peace.

Her memoir, expressed in lucent prose and nearly sixty shining poems, became (as she puts it) a chart of my emergence into the light of awareness from the dark tunnel I inhabited at the beginning of my life ... from the depressions,...