Sorrentino is an award-winning author of several novels, and in this memoir, his experience and polish show. The book is narrowly focused, almost exclusively on his relationships with his parents. The dominant and most problematic parent is his mother. She is intelligent, quick-witted, cultured, and crazy. His father is also impossible but in a different direction: to write his (successful) novels, he needs to be hermetically sealed from the world and this forces his wife and son to live with it. This is not a plot-driven memoir but there is plenty of emotional drama. Toward the end, after the death of the father, Sorrentino and his mother enter the equivalent of Everest's Death Zone. Their estrangements last up to two years with short reconnections, but the way each has been molded by life and their relationship makes a sane connection nearly possible (even with the author's long-term therapy). This is not a happy nor amusing book, but it tells a tale familiar to many people: loving someone and being unable to establish working rules. I like Sorrentino's style very, very much, and I plan to reach his novels. There are pages where there are many short sentences that repeat each other except for a word or two, and the evolving difference is powerful. It took a lot of courage to write this book, and I have the feeling the author needed some validation from the reading public that as much as he loved her, his mother WAS crazy.