The best un-miserable memoirs dealing with tricky family history written with wit and authenticity

Kit and I share some life similarities, she’s a working-class girl with a Birmingham background, published later in life, and I was keen to read her story. Written as scenes from childhood with sharp observation and wit, her book illustrates an unpredictable childhood. The daughter of an Irish mother and Caribbean father in a large and sometimes chaotic family, where there is love in the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but not always at home. There are the familiar places, the family dynamics observed with the clarity of a child, and the tit-for-tat games her parents play - dad buys a new car, the next week, mum a harmonica and Davy Crockett hat. All quirks observed and challenging situations related with a lightness of touch and wit, a genuine pleasure to read.

Jeanette Winterson writes her upbringing as an only, adopted child with a mother who hated being a nobody and found her life in church, who used face powder, but not lipstick – too fast and loose. Written with wry prose. "My mother was a snob and she didn’t like me mixing with the dog biscuit girls from Oswaldtwistle." A child longing for love and loyalty, wrestling with a mother who parcelled out either one on ration. It is a brilliant portrayal of the mother-daughter dynamic, a memoir that captures the Lancashire spirit of family life, roll up your sleeves and get on with it. 

Mixing official documents with real, remembered events, Lemn Sissay’s memoir is a search for identity, for his true name. Left in a home in Liverpool for unmarried mothers, he is moved between a series of foster and care homes, until he is given access to all his records in 2015, after a thirty-year campaign to find them. He finds who he really is. It’s an honest, poignant, unsettling, and heartfelt journey, revealing how a small boy’s life is shaped by ‘the authority’ and the faceless state. Complimented with inspiring poems and useful resources, this is a hopeful and helpful book. 

A slice of real life for so many that grow up in poverty in Britain, a life lived pinballing from house to flat to school and back again, on the move with a single mother, Scotland, Liverpool, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, and the North East, Kerry writes about all her traumatic experiences with honesty, humour, and spot-on descriptions of setting – "Hetton- le Hole, hell hole." Formative experiences and a discovery of official documents, help her reflect on a childhood that she survived and thrived beyond. Never judgemental, always honest, required reading.

Queen of memoir, and the only American in this bouquet of books, yet with so many similarities to my other recommendations. Mary Karr’s childhood starts with the violence of her mother, flows through adoration of her father, anecdotalist and storyteller supreme in The Liars Club of his local bar. She explores the family dysfunction through colloquial prose that suits each situation perfectly. It evokes the American south of the early sixties, lived in a family as volatile as the events surrounding them, and the contrast of Colorado in 1963, where the family moved by accident, and revisiting Texas in 1980 to nurse her sick father and relive his stories. The first book that changed the landscape of memoir, that raised it to a higher hill.