The book begins in the undertakers where she was born during the war years. She was brought up in a fairly deprived background as the middle sibling of three sisters. She grows up and marries for the first time at the age of eighteen, has two sons and divorces at the age of thirty- eight, then she marries for a second time, only to be once again betrayed by the love of her life.... There is a lot of trauma in the latter years of her first marriage, with her husbands affair, and the husband of the other party. Just before her second marriage breaks up, her Mother dies of cancer, her marriage breaks up, and her father dies all it the space of the same three weeks. Again it's a traumatic time going through a second break up, with a husbands betrayal with a younger woman. At the age of fifty she has to go back to work and become independent once more, a task she finds very daunting, as she has always had a man in her life looking after her from the age of fourteen. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.