In her latest – and presumably her last – book, “Quicksands” (Counterpoint, 370 pages, $24), novelist (and travel/food/wine writer) Sybille Bedford writes that, if the relation of any person to history “is that of victim or of escapee,” she considers herself “largely – and gratefully – an escapee.” She was born in Germany in 1911 but left early, and permanently, growing up instead in Italy, England, and France. In the mid-1930s, with her passport about to expire and the German government having confiscated her money for political statements she had made in a literary journal, her friends the Aldous Huxleys arranged for her to marry a gay Englishman to give her British citizenship. Later, the Huxleys helped her get out of Europe just as the war broke out, and she spent seven years in America.

Mrs. Bedford’s unusual and tumultuous early life provided much material for fiction. “A Legacy,” her first and most praised novel, published in 1956, follows the lives of three German families tied by marriage from the consolidation of Germany to the eve of World War I. An investigation of the forces that determined the tragic events of the 1930s and 1940s, it is also Mrs. Bedford’s effort to imagine the kinds of blows that could have given her father (as the novel’s young narrator, Francesca, puts it), “that streak of pessimism, gloom, and caution which must have made life seem to him such a precarious course, and life with him so peculiar.” Thirty years later, she revisited this landscape with “Jigsaw,” a slightly fictionalized memoir of her youth until the end of the 1920s.

It was logical to expect “Quicksands” to follow sequentially by describing the three-quarters of her life since then. Instead, in a very fragmented narrative, the new book covers in detail only the period leading up to the war – she discusses the circumstances of her marriage for the first time in writing – and the joyful return to Europe afterward. Jumping back and forth in time as memory leads her, Mrs. Bedford also retells the story of her childhood, a repetition for which she apologizes repeatedly.

The story is this: Her father was from the Catholic landed gentry of southern Germany; her mother was an English heiress many years his junior. Until the outbreak of World War I, the family lived for periods both in the Berlin home of her father’s wealthy Jewish in-laws from his first marriage and in a chateau in the south, which her mother had purchased. The war left them poor, and her mother, who was already intermittently absent pursuing various love affairs, took off for good. For three years Mrs. Bedford, her father, and a lone servant eked out a strange existence in the large and now gloomy chateau. They only had the food they could raise themselves or barter for, but in the evenings, they decanted and drank the excellent wines in the cellar. Life changed abruptly when her mother, about to remarry, asked young Sybille to come to Italy for six months, and her father died from an appendicitis.

When Mrs. Bedford arrived in Italy, her mother was having second thoughts about the marriage and “seemed a little puzzled as to why she had sent for me,” the author wrote in “Jigsaw.” Daughter, mother, and mother’s latest admirer – not the fiance, but a much younger Italian man named Alessandro – spent some peripatetic months in Italy. Then Mrs. Bedford was packed off to some English acquaintances, the Robbinses, who her mother said would choose an appropriate school for her. It turned out the Robbinses didn’t think highly of schools, so instead they hired a series of tutors, and for a few years Mrs. Bedford joined their bohemian household. The arrangement was friendly but nothing more. When she was 16, the Robbinses decamped for Australia (or New Zealand – she doesn’t remember which), and she stayed, quite happily, in London by herself. (She had almost no formal education.)

During these years, on holidays, she joined her mother, who eventually married Alessandro, at various residences first in Italy and, from 1926 on, in a fishing port in the south of France called Sanary-sur-Mer. These were “the happiest years,” she now writes; besides the beauty of Sanary and the excitement of her first romantic pursuits, she encountered an artistic circle that included the Huxleys. But this period contained tragedy, also. One summer, when she arrived, she sensed that something was wrong. Alessandro (who was devoted to her mother, but was treated as “her creation and possession”) was having an affair.

Her mother, apoplectic with rage and jealousy, and getting no relief from the sleeping pills she usually relied on, had gotten a prescription for morphine from a local doctor. Over the course of the summer, her dependency on the drug, her moods, and her health all steadily worsened. The description in “Jigsaw” is harrowing. That book ends with Alessandro finally leaving one morning at dawn, waking Sybille to say goodbye and giving the future novelist his typewriter. In “Quicksands,” Mrs. Bedford discloses that her mother lived another seven years. She saw her for the last time being lifted onto a train, headed for a cure in another country. “Later, circumstances were not propitious for direct contact,” she writes. “She died in a hospital in her mid-fifties, I fear, though I hope not, alone.”

Famously, Mrs. Bedford has expressed no resentment toward her mother, or indeed toward either parent; an essay published about her 10 years ago in The New Criterion was appropriately titled “Without Rancor.” She says that she owes her mother for giving her a love of literature and art, as well as “an impregnation of her own lucid compassion for the suffering and brutality of – I cannot put it lower here – the Human Condition.” But she acknowledges that there were “few bridges between her ideals and her private conduct.” Whereas the reader feels instinctively that, for Mrs. Bedford herself, there are many connections. Among the strengths of her writing is her grasp of the ways in which people can be generous or cruel to those they love.

“Quicksands” begins with her first years back in Europe after the war. She was living in Rome and Paris and trying to write again after a long period of discouragement – in her 20s, she had written three novels and had all of them rejected. She devotes the last few chapters of “Quicksands” to this period, describing how Sanary became a haven first for German expatriates – Thomas Mann, among them – and then for the English “Bright Young Things” of the 1920s, with whom she drank, danced, and caused scandal on the local nightlife scene. She evokes life in the Huxleys’ house, where she stayed during some summers in the early 1930s and where the day was organized around Aldous’s writing schedule. His books “dazzled” her and exerted too strong an influence on her own early attempts. It was only after the war, when she sat down to write a book about Mexico, where she had spent the last year of her American exile, that she found herself writing in a voice that belonged to her. “So what had changed in that long interval of discouragement backed by idleness? Other company, other voices. Time.” “A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico” became her first published book.

We learn other details from “Quicksands.” Some pseudonyms used in “Jigsaw” are abandoned. She mentions two long-term relationships, both with women. The first, with a younger woman named Evelyn Gendel, coincided with the first years of her successful, confident writing and was very happy. The second was with Eda Lord, an American novelist. This is all interesting to admirers of Mrs. Bedford’s work, but the narrative of this memoir is, to be fair, probably too fractured and confusing to be enjoyable to those who haven’t already read her books, particularly “Jigsaw.”

Mrs. Bedford now regrets the stories she can’t tell and the time she wasted through “sloth, discouragement, and of course distractions.” But those distractions – years spent in “beautiful or interesting places,” friendships, meals, wines, falling in love – were part of what made her writing, when she finally found her voice, so rich.

Miss Taylor is an assistant at The New Yorker.