This book just got better and better for me.

Margaret Forster has told her life through the houses she has lived in as a child, an adolescent, being newly married, in her emerging career, and as a mother.

It begins with a dissatisfied young girl who prefers to live in friends' houses than with her family and concludes with the author struggling to counter her recurring battle with cancer, but seeing her home as her true place of safety, of wholeness, and of hope.

While I couldn't relate to Margaret Forster's eagerness to leave home, even as a child, I relished her account of her early married life with Hunter Davies in London. The couple's success as writers and the glamour of the people they met, while turning a dilapidated house into a much loved home, was great escapism.

This is a book I'll read again on a Sunday afternoon in front of a roaring fire, and it also inspires me to write the account of my life in the same way.