Aubrey Malone is the youngest of nine children born to Hugh Dillon-Malone, a solicitor from Ballina, a town in the West of Ireland, in 1953.

In this detailed memoir he documents his father's problems with alcohol, many of which were transmitted to himself, causing feelings of depression, lack of self-esteem, and on one notable occasion, a night in jail after a drink-induced car accident.

He became a teacher after graduating from college but suffered much stress and ill-health during this time. Afterwards he turned to a life of writing and this too he documents in a book which also acts as a valentine to a lost world of innocence, both in himself and an Ireland he looks back on with a mixture of nostalgia and regret.