"Memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that." ...

she is one of the most thrillingly unique mid-century English novelists. But somehow, she cuts a lonely figure – not part of any particular literary scene, her works criminally under-recognised ...

Amis was by then already established as the enfant terrible of English literature. His semi-autobiographical first novel The Rachel Papers had propelled him onto the literary scene in 1973.