This is a story about love, loneliness and despair. Returning to New Zealand after many years abroad, I felt an exile in my own country.

It is a story about overcoming this despair, both in myself and in my clients, and of how patterns can repeat in families.

It is a story about connecting with the Māori world to try to belong.

It is also a story about my relationship with my mother, who became a Dame for her services to New Zealand literature, a writer and publisher of more than 140 books. Would she have published this memoir?