This memoir is set against a background of 19th-century pioneering ancestors and the respectability of the extended Irish-Australian Catholic families into which the writer was born.
The comfortable lifestyle of a Melbourne  household is glimpsed through the eyes of this quiet ‘middle’ child, one whose path through the turbulence and loneliness of adolescence leads him in unexpected directions.
As a restless young man on the streets of London and Paris, he is on the prowl for sexual adventures with both men and women, finding part-time work as a gigolo, a life model and a porn stud.
Sensing the self-destructive nature of this course of action, he seeks safety in the life of a monk in a Trappist monastery in Ireland, but eventually returns to the ‘real’ world of the city – money, sex and sin – and the ever-present  tension between sex and religion, between what we want and what we are allowed to have.
Desperate to be ‘normal’, he meets and marries a pretty girl