This dazzling memoir ironically titled A Book of Untruths is actually ablaze with veracity; the third child, and only daughter of sensationally dysfunctional parents, Dad from an island off the west coast of Ireland, Mum a posh Perthshire woolen mill owner's daughter, or was she?, Doyle describes a household where the plat(s) du jour were violence, beatings, shamings and abandonings on the motorway.
When, in trepidation, she shared her manuscript with her eldest sibling he replied, “They were shit parents. It happens”. Somehow Miranda, Mir to her family, constructs sympathetic human beings out of the chaos, chronicling the truth via lies from family, society, boarding school, boyfriends, dads, most of all dads.
Of course most families are mad, those proclaiming the greatest normality usually the maddest, but if this family portrayal doesn’t make you weep, laugh out loud, scream in horror, identify, you’re clearly keeping your heart in a biscuit tin under the bed. Go retrieve it immediately and treat it, and yourself, to this most extraordinary evocation of the fragility of family, of sanity, of children, of us all.
