My mother said I was over imaginative, but I was simply a liar by nature. I was happily at home with mendacity. It was less boring than the truth. My natural home lay in fiction.' Booker-prize winning writer Bernice Rubens' poignant, evocative and funny memoir reveals not only many of the origins of her darkly brilliant novels, but brings to life her war-time childhood, her work as a film-maker and her deep friendships - and some equally deep enmities - in the literary world which she enlivened so magnificently. Bernice Rubens died in the autumn of 2004, very soon after completing WHEN I GROW UP.