has on an older student. However, the education she has received at this school sets her up for university scholarships in Dublin, then Hull, and finally, in the 1960s, in Oxford.

She flourishes intellectually, but her personal relationships are a disaster. Her aim in life, she says, "was something to do with loving and being loved." Unable to achieve either, she retreats into books and white wine. She is in her late 30s by now, living in London "on the edge of alcoholism." It is at this time that her father dies of leukemia.

"I feel a pang every time I remember that the last he knew of me was those drinking years. He'd be so proud of me now," she writes. "Yet I also believe that it is notYou know, it was one of the great tragedies of the 1990s that we never got a Saved by the Bell video game on the SNES. One heavily inspired by the Earthbound series, in which you had to help Zack do whatever he did for 23 minutes an episode.