»First we dream of the future, then we live it, and in the end, once this lived future is in the past, we recount it to ourselves.«

This autobiography is special: it stops where others usually begin. Urs Widmer's years as a child, as a young man, as a student, as an editor. His family home, friends, his first loves, his wife May. Family history and family myths. School, teachers. Holidays, travel. Basel, Montpellier, Greece, Paris. The banal and the dramatic at a time when history was being written: World War II, the Cold War, the sixties. And, again and again, his parents, the ever-present shadows in his work. Even though these memories often deal with the tragic, their vitality and vividness are unsurpassable.