Life in Tove's neighbourhood in Copenhagen is confusing and difficult: her father can't find work, her mother is angry and remote, and Tove herself sometimes thinks she's been exchanged at birth. But 'inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul' and she soon realizes that she has a vocation, something unknowable and secret within, and that if she can only find the right words, she will one day succeed in forging a true life of her own—somewhere beyond the narrow streets of her childhood. The first volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Childhood captures the triumphs and tragedies of girlhood with intense vividness and a poet's clarity of vision.