This is the story of how and why a talented writer came to kill himself.

When Diana Athill met the man she calls Didi, an Egyptian in exile, she fell in love instantly and out of love just as fast. Didi moved into her flat, they shared housework and holidays, and a life of easy intimacy seemed to beckon.

But Didi's sweetness and intelligence soon revealed a darker side - he was a gambler, a drinker and a womanizer, impossible to live with but impossible to ignore. With painful honesty, Athill explores the three years they spent together, a period that culminated in Didi's suicide - in her home - an event he described in the journals he left for her to read as 'the one authentic act of my life'.