This reads like a memoir, complete with photographs supposedly taken by the narrator herself. At times I wondered if Amory Clay really had existed: "Born 7 March 1908, Died 23 June 1983," as the postscript records. The period detail from Berlin in the early 1930s to Saigon during the Vietnam war is exact and perceived from a personal female viewpoint. The chronological tale is interspersed with The Barrandale Journal 1977 which reveals the narrator in the time in which she is writing, a retired woman of 69. The scenes are carefully set and the life is not without incident but I soon became rather weary of Amory Clay. Perhaps the staging is the problem, incidents appear to be chosen to illustrate the times - from a love affair in New York in the 1930s to her daughter's entanglement with a hippie cult in California - rather than being a record of a real messy life. Essentially the whole work is a little too careful.