The controversy that Sally Mann stirred when she published Immediate Family featuring nude pictures of her children in the early 90s weighs heavily in this memoir. What an artist captures, what a mother knows and what the public sees can be dangerously different things. She argues that her kids were intuitively understood the stagecraft behind the work to present the contradictions of childhood innocence and peculiar darkness. She does not dawdle over her childhood or claim any sort of special early talent. Instead, she identifies themes and precursors of her life mission and obsessions. The book is an honest and thoughtful account of personal successes and failures and their link with the strange and surprising history of her ancestry. She emphasizes the extensive blanks in her memory, even in her adult life, whilst remaining admirably transparent.