In 1990 Slavenka Drakulic travelled through Yugoslavia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, spending time with women and listening to their life stories, cooking with them, drinking coffee when they had any, learning how they had survived communism, and sometimes managing to laugh.

This is her account of those women's lives in pre-revolutionary Eastern Europe. The author, a journalist and cultural commentator in the former Yugoslavia, was a co-founder of that country's first feminist group in 1979.