It contains a wide range of correspondence, notes and memoirs, and was published a year and a half after his death.

Beginning with a short biography of Robert by Virginia, the bulk of the book consists of excerpts of correspondence from the period from 1939 to 1970, from when he began writing science fiction until the onset of his first major illness.

Additionally there is the original postlude to Podkayne of Mars and a discussion of cuts made to his novel Red Planet.

Someone — it could have been only [Virginia Heinlein] — had washed his face and combed his hair and turned whatever it was that Robert might have wanted to say into the equivalent of thank-you notes for a respectable English tea.

What’s left is actually rather boring and does a great disservice to the real Heinlein, whose physical person may have been embodied as a conventional hard-right conservative but whose writing was — sometimes vulgarly — that of a free-thinking iconoclast".