Begun in 1950 at the excavation house at Nimrud in Iraq and completed some fifteen years later, this memoir traces a long life from a sheltered Victorian girlhood to international literary fame. The author recalls growing up at Ashfield, the family home in Torquay, in an affectionate household shaped by a beloved mother, an older sister, and an early world of nurses, governesses, and invented games. She follows her path through a courtship and first marriage to Archibald Christie, the upheaval of the First World War, and her volunteer service in a hospital dispensary, where she absorbed the knowledge of drugs and poisons that later informed her fiction. The account moves through the strains and dissolution of that first marriage, the loss of her mother, and the slow recovery that followed, though it passes over her own celebrated 1926 disappearance almost entirely. A second life opens with travel to the Middle East and her marriage to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, whose digs she joined for decades. Throughout, she reflects on the craft and accident of becoming a writer, on the books and characters that made her famous, and on the people and places that mattered to her. The narrative closes in contentment, looking back across childhood, marriage, work, and old age with gratitude rather than regret.