In this breathtaking memoir, First Person Female, New York Times bestseller Maria Flook gives a simmering account of her coming of age as a novelist. With unreserved honesty and comic detours, Flook maps her literary career, book after book. She reveals literary connections that were blurred and transformed by sexual liaisons, including an illicit affair with her longtime New York editor. With shocking glimpses of her secret life, her frank vision as a realist writer, and her role as a mother facing her child's life and death struggle with cancer, we see a writer consumed by family betrayals, trysts at hotels, and visits with her son in the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit. Flook's startling candor has the grace of authority. Both lyrical and stark, the writer's unfeigned story is the foundation for her pursuit of art in a chronicle that leads to redemption.