But what did teenage girls in country towns want with Latin and French and art? What use would it be to them? The literary longings of a studious girl born into a working class family, hot afternoons in a dust-plain Wilcannia schoolhouse; the temptation to stay, and the perils of breaking free The Happiness Glass reflects complex griefs in the life of Lily Brennan. Lilys story allows the author to navigate some of the difficulties of memoir, and out of its bittersweet blend of real, remembered, and imagined life, the portrait of a writer gradually emerges. In fiction that forms around a core of memory, life writing that acknowledges the elusiveness of truth, Carol Lefevre has written a remarkable, risk-taking book that explores questions of homesickness, infertility, adoption, and family estrangement, in Lily Brennans life, and in her own.