The best memoirs about troubled families and the secrets they keep

A beautifully written and meticulously researched family memoir that made me question what I would have done to survive the turbulence and brutality of the Nazi era. Themes of antisemitism and identity continue to haunt four siblings - Jehuda, Jacob, Sender, and Sala - as they leave Poland behind to establish new lives as Alex, Jacques, Henri, and Sara in Paris.

An irresistible and complex personal story that I would happily reread because I devoured this page turner too quickly! At the heart of it all is Sara, the author’s mysterious, glamorous, melancholy grandmother and a shoebox of her treasured possessions. The author, a skilled journalist, adds power to the narrative with examples of populist divisive politics and the rise of nationalism in current times.

The author’s account of grinding, unrelentless poverty and neglect, set against her eventual, miraculous escape to a different life made me cheer.

Bravely, Kerry Hudson returns to the scenes of many crimes committed against her to really understand why the past refuses to let her go and whether anything has changed for deprived families in those rundown British towns she grew up in.

In an early chapter the author recalls being pushed between two adults across a table. She thought it was a game, but her parents were in fact arguing over who should keep her. Neither was willing.

This is an important and shameful piece of British social history and an unflinching examination of a dysfunctional family with different recollections of the past. 

In the aftermath of a parent’s death, sifting through their possessions is a necessary but painful rite of passage. It can feel overwhelming and confrontational, especially if the relationship was difficult, as is the case here.

I loved how the author highlights specific objects from the detritus of her mother’s hoarding to piece together the hurts and distress of a woman she hardly knew. A complex mother and daughter story that comments authoritatively on the psychology behind hoarding and raises important questions about our material world and what our possessions reveal about our interior life.

I have written about some of these things in my own book and found this memoir at roughly the same period in my life. It stayed with me a long time after the final page. 

Miranda Doyle makes sense of her life through a series of lies told to her and by her. It’s a fabulously original and shocking approach.

One of several siblings at the mercy of an explosive father and passive mother, her truth, as she admits, is also unreliable. I enjoyed how the writer breaks free to question the idea of truthfulness in memoir and her astute observations made me look a little closer at her family photos for the subtext, and to question their veracity. Terrifying episodes are recounted with verve and urgency, akin to a rollercoaster ride.

In an age of post-truth, fake news, and false narratives, the science behind lying sheds further light on the dynamics of this family and the narrator’s quest for closure.      

The opening scene is one of the best you will ever read in the memoir genre. It serves as the catalyst for a hair-raising account of a chaotic, nomadic lifestyle where food and money are in short supply, midnight flits are frequent, but dreams are free.

Despite the inevitable disappointments and dangers associated with feckless, inadequate parenting, a strange kind of love and eventual acceptance propels the narrator and her siblings to break free and seek a more secure adulthood for themselves.  

This book has a special place in my heart because it taught me so much about writing craft, how to structure a story for impact, and how to bring scenes to life for a satisfying reader experience. A must-read for budding memoirists and enthusiastic readers of the genre.