Jane Thynne

An End to Misery Memoir?

Animal Magic: A Brother’s Story

By

Jonathan Cape 322pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

Problem Child

By

Simon & Schuster 328pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia – A Father and Son’s Story

By

Simon & Schuster 222pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

All happy families are alike, so no one wants to read about them. Unhappy families, however, spawned a publishing mega-trend called misery memoir. This led to bookshops creating entire new shelving sections devoted to ‘Painful Lives’, filled with titles like No Mummy! and Please Daddy Stop!, which were pretty criminal in themselves. This particular publishing trend seemed to go on forever, so it’s a relief to find, at last, that the family memoir is moving onto something far more interesting.

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