This narrative memoir celebrates the life of best-selling and award-winning novelist Kate Grenville's mother. Nance Russell was born in 1912 in country New South Wales to working class parents who worked assiduously to move up the social ladder. As they were doing so, they often left their children with others. Nancy was in kinship care, foster care, and boarding school. She then, at the insistence of her mother, became a pharmacist, swapping that career in life for teaching, the profession she had wanted as a child.