Irma Kurtz has been agony aunt for Cosmopolitan for more than 40 years, and anyone picking up this book might expect another collection of questions and answers; but this autobiography is much subtler than that. We certainly get, in the course of the book, a great many of her views on the myriad pains and dilemmas of the human condition – including some wonderfully weird speculations such as wondering how long it took primitive man to realise that actions done entirely for pleasure were actually the cause of a small new creature arriving months later.

There are plenty of dialogues between Common Sense and Wisdom, and individual situations on which she has views, but basically this is her own life story, beginning in America, touring in Europe, falling in love in and with Paris, and finally settling in London at the beginning of the swinging 60s. Kurtz is caustic about fashions in agony, referring to seasonal affective disorder "being assigned a pompous moniker to take its place among pathological disorders requiring support groups, sun lamps and pricey treatments". She's caustic, too, about the way psychoanalysis was becoming a cult at Columbia University when she was there in 1952: "Shrinking was touted among the affluent as a cure-all for angst and aggravation… the analysands used a bash-and-blame vocabulary that left us, the great unshrunk, gawping."

This is not a textbook nor a month-by-month account of one individual's life, but a highly readable stew of opinions and happenings that one can read simply for pleasure and finally realise one has actually learned a lot.