At seventeen, Maggie, who had "never had a boyfriend, never had sex and never had a job" went, totally unprepared, to Oxford. From the 1960s onwards she was living the defining events of her generation: the coming of the Pill and sexual freedom, tremors in the cozy British layer-cake of class and race.

In the 1980s Maggie stumbles into the literary world, falls in love, gets married and has a daughter. Writing with remarkable honesty and grace, Maggie explores the questions that matter most: success and failure, sex, death and parenthood - our animal life.