Right it's the 25th! Unmarked spoilers from here on out.

I think my favourite characters were the children. I loved their 'take no crap' attitude to the many awful situations that befell them during the course of the memoir. Probably my favourite moment involving Brian was when he and Jeannette took on the neighbourhood bullies with an improvised catapult. That bit was fun.

But at other times it was a tough read. Particularly involving the dad's alcoholism. My own mother wasn't nearly as bad as all that, but she had her moments when she'd just get absolutely smashed, and it genuinely scared me. Honestly the kids coped with the whole situation a whole lot better than I could.

Also, I suspect the dad comes off initially worse in most people's estimations but the mother was, I think, nearly or just as bad. She was sitting on land that could've been used to support her family, and she didn't. Having said all that though, both parents came across very sympathetically for me. That final sequence in New York was pretty sad, with the father dying.

I kinda called Maureen going off the rails at some point, mainly because she was conspicuously out of focus for a lot of the memoir. I'm glad she seemed to be doing okay in California.