The dysfunctional family memoir has had a profitable run since Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life was published in 1989. There’s been Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, and many more. During the last 10 years Ben Miller has been working away on his own account of bipolar parents (one manic, one depressed), double-bound youth, and troubled siblings in 1970s Iowa. Compared with the books I’ve mentioned, as well as recent parent-haunted autobiographies by established novelists Andre Dubus III and Richard Russo, River Bend Chronicle sits on a higher shelf.
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