Graduate of Columbia University in Manhattan with a degree in English Literature. Followed by a travelling and generally impecunious life: two years in Paris, one year crewing on a twelve-metre yacht, finally to London where Irma became a journalist and founding member of the team that made Nova Magazine in the late 1960’s. Thereafter, worked freelance broadcasting ( among her contributions Mediterranean Tales following Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad for BBC4 and a biography of the composer Rodrigo for Radio 4) Irma has written travel books (The Great American Bus Ride taking a long look at her native land through the windows of Greyhound busses) and more recently Then Again, retracing her first trip to Europe. Her career has been based on observation rather than scholarship. She is known among the generations as an agony aunt for British Cosmopolitan Magazine since 1972. Her last book, About Time is based on observation and experience of growing old. She lives in London, though never married, she is the mother of Marc Beers, and proud granny of Jasper.