William (Billy) Budge was born in 1948 in the small northern Cape Breton community of Neil's Harbour. When he was seven his family moved to the rugged and lonely St. Paul Island where his father became the lighthouse keeper. Positioned at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the island is known as the Graveyard of the Gulf- often shrouded in fog, subject to violent gales and storms, it has been the site of numerous shipwrecks. On St. Paul Budge's family lived in almost total isolation and learned to cope in a world without neighbours, electricity, schools, or mainland comforts.

In Memoirs of a Lightkeeper's Son, Budge tells the family's remarkable story of survival on the island: the excitement of unexpected guests, the arrival of the supply shipsm and the sadness of sickness, tragedy, and loss. Budge chronicles a life in which almost every activity, backbreaking or blissful, had to do with the family's subsistence. With humour and reverence, he recalls a solitude and self-sufficiency difficult for most of us to imagine today.