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"The city had begun to enter me. It was the ultimate distraction. London was an endless maze of places I could lose myself. . . . Walking, I wanted to live on every gorgeous London street." —from Off the King's Road

In an understated, urbane style that recalls such memoirists as Joan Didion and Paula Fox, Phyllis Raphael describes how she landed in London in December 1968 as the restless wife of a Hollywood movie producer. She had brought her three young children from Los Angeles and the plan was to live in London for three months on MGM's dime while her husband was producing a film there. Instead—in a maneuver Raphael wasn't expecting—he left her for an eighteen-year-old actress. And in a decision she could never have predicted, Raphael stayed.

In Off the King's Road , Raphael writes of being an exile and an accident victim, an expatriate let loose in a country and in a world that in the turbulent 1960s was becoming expatriated from itself. She arrived in London naive, dependent, and dissatisfied, and left several years later as another person entirely—a woman in command, for better or worse, of her own life. Written with seductive elegance, humor, and sexual candor, Off the King's Road speaks to women of all ages of the possibilities of a life transformed by circumstance.