Any life, even the most unadventurous, can be made interesting in narrative if it is artful and well written. Valerie Barnes has had a fascinating life if the criteria are travel and meeting people from other cultures. But really, these are not enough to make an engaging memoir. There is a need for shapeliness, for an elegant prose style and, most of all, for a strong subjectivity in the narrating voice. Sadly, these are seriously lacking here. The failure to interpret and filter the meaning of the lived experience through a powerfully established speaking subject leaves Barnes’s life story strangely unrealised. Perhaps this bears out Sidonie Smith’s suggestion in A Poetics of Women's Autobiography (1987) that there is often in women’s life writing a ‘self-effacing speaking posture’ negating ‘the ambition inherent in the presumption of writing her story at all’.