Brilliant...with an incredibly high success rate

Gillian is an author who always makes sense

Forget ridiculous aversion and repression techniques and look your addiction straight in the eye with her simple, one-day-at-a-time technique

It teaches you, not tricks and gimmicks, but such effective common sense and home truths that I was able to bring an entirely new attitude to my efforts to give up. I found, as a result, that my worst stop-smoking experiences - the tetchiness, the tearfulness, the constant teetering on the brink of failure and the absurd wish to die - didn't happen at all this time

What I found most liberating about this technique was that I no longer needed to run or hide from wanting a cigarette. Not only could I go anywhere, do anything, be with anyone whether they smoked or not, but I also didn't need to try to deny the desire to smoke by eating and drinking more...It is, quite simply and literally, a technique for life

all last week, owing to a steady influx of politically incorrect visitors, the house has been full of cigarette smoke and the astrays full of stubs, and although I have not smoked for nine years, I don't mind. I owe this to Gillian Riley, who made it possible for me to give up smoking almost without pain and not turn into an anti-smoker. What was most helpful was the removal of the sense of mental deprivation that essentially wrecked every previous attempt of mine to stop smoking

Straightforward and simple, it succeeds without drugs, hypnotism or acupuncture...It really works!

It's a revolutionary method, unlike any other practised in this country

Hypnotically readable, this wonderful book is like exploring an attic packed with fascinating odds and ends... Highly evocative, oddly moving, and includes some marvellous trivia

In this memoir she describes her eccentric, dangerous, wonderful bohemian parents...Blackburn emerged from this turmoil as a fine writer, and this book is full of understanding and reconciliation

a rich account...brilliant vignettes

This piercing memoir paints in vivid colours Julia Blackburn's nightmarish childhood

Blackburn tells us about these things in a compelling authorial voice which is by turns numb and incredibly sensitive

Brutally honest book ...deeply moving testament to the love that can somehow survive

An extraordinary family memoir... A bohemian classic