As Edna O’Brien confronts the brutal realities of aging - pain, confusion, hospitals, carers, the battle to keep writing - the world she built through language begins to contract. Her son Carlo tracks every flicker of resilience and every devastating loss, from the comic to the catastrophic, in a narrative that moves with the rhythm of real decline: hope, setback, defiance, collapse, repeat. An unguarded, deeply humane memoir about the cost of genius, the labour of caretaking, and the grief we’re never prepared for.