This book hung about my book case for a good year and a half, and I vaguely remember finding it on a massive book sale event for a few euros and taking it home, liking its premise of filling in Virginia Woolf's life. And then, Susan Sellers turned out to be a lecturer on my MLitt programme and I recalled having this book. Which is why I finally read it!

The start was a bit slow. The novel is written from Vanessa's perspective, in a style loosely resembling stream-of-consciousness. Since these are all memories, I initially had some trouble with the fragmented timeline, but this might also be due to my fragmented reading of the book. Once I got into it properly, I pretty much read half of it in two hours, going much more smoothly with the flow of the novel.

Eventually, both sisters have their problems as characters, and Sellers is not afraid to show them. However, despite the abundance of detail and inner world of Vanessa, they never truly became flesh-and-blood to me - both remained a sort of hazy, dreamlike creatures. The bohemian lifestyle of both does not help ward this sensation of the fantastical off. While the novel is clearly very well researched, it refuses to turn the lives of the sisters into a neat narrative like so many other autofiction does, but this might have gone somewhat at the cost of the eventual readability of the book and sympathy of the reader.