Nothing in Penelope Fitzgerald’s funny, poignant, sometimes shocking work is actually lighthearted, but she lived in a time and place of more irony than outrage. Her own life was chaotic—she came from a family of literary men, began publishing biographies at 58, and was sixty when she published her first novel, a mystery. She wrote The Golden Child to distract her dying husband, a veteran whose alcohol addiction began during the war and whose legal troubles (including getting caught forging checks) made both of their lives difficult. That book was published without its last several chapters, which devastated her, but she kept going. She had a lot to write about. She raised three children (she writes wonderfully about children). Her life had been dramatic: homelessness after the check forging incident, a poltergeist, and the sinking of the barge where she lived (it actually sank twice). She wound up writing her extraordinary novels in all kinds of odd corners. Though she started late, she published nine “microchip novels,” three biographies, and a story collection (which came out after her death). Some of these books came from her life experiences, and then, later in life, she turned to historical fiction. Throughout, she kept her ironic curiosity and her sense of the constant presence of imminent disaster.