Jane Thynne
An End to Misery Memoir?
Animal Magic: A Brother’s Story
By Andrew Barrow
Jonathan Cape 322pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Problem Child
By Caradoc King
Simon & Schuster 328pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia – A Father and Son’s Story
By Patrick Cockburn
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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