Cheating death thanks to a premonition, cooking for a cannibal and surviving the apparently murderous ministrations of a racist maternity nurse: along with infidelities and estrangements, these startling occurrences become almost incidental in a volume whose defining dramas run to kidnapping her own five-year-old daughter and then living under police protection, and fighting off a homicidal gang of home invaders with a hunting knife in her 60s.
Her beginnings, we learn, were fittingly unconventional. She was conceived in a mental hospital where her beloved mother, Joanna, a three-time divorcee and enduring romantic, was being treated for suicidal depression; her father, Guyanese writer Jan Carew, was seeking help for what was then termed pseudoneurotic schizophrenia.
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