'I'd confess to anything. It's not in my nature to wait to be found out.'Elisabeth Wynhausen was four when her family arrived from Holland intent on fitting in. In this exuberant and engaging memoir, she propels herself from one comic debacle to the next, pausing now and again to marvel over the customs and the cooking of the locals: 'The same scoop of mashed potato. The same subservient beans. The same lamb chop, as dried out as the Nullarbor Plains.'At university, she falls in with a pack of 'nerveless aesthetes' and discovers nervous sex. Extricating herself to teach English to the daughters of the gentry, she flees, yet again, to wind up in the Bloomsbury of the south, questioning the working class pretensions of Sydney's bohemians.Manly Girls catapults through two decades at a time of Australia's most frantic development. By chance, the author and the country emerge from adolescence together.