This autobiography is set in Dublin, Ireland, and almost the entire story takes place in the house where Christy Brown grew up.

Aside from some play with his brothers, Brown almost never left his home as a child and teenager, and so the house dominates his autobiography. It becomes a metaphor for the disabled body in which Christy Brown lived: a body which sustained his able mind but did not allow him free movement.

It must have been a crowded house, with two parents and thirteen children. It cannot have been a large one, as when Brown (at eighteen years old) was doing exercises in the kitchen he would bang his leg on the fire-grate or his head on a chair. It was, however, a house that made him welcome.

From his early childhood where he lay in the kitchen or garden, through the years where he crawled...