As the decade draws to a close, some readers will be eager to bid adieu to that overindulged literary trend of the 1990s – the dysfunctional family memoir. But amid the shapeless, self-mythologizing volumes clogging bookstore shelves are a few dark jewels: autobiographies that fulfill the interests of literature as well as those of full disclosure.

David Layton’s exceptional new memoir is such a book. The 35-year-old Toronto writer is the son of Canadian poet Irving Layton, and his younger muse, Aviva Cantor Layton. Through the eyes of his pre-adolescent self, Layton revisits incidents from the spectacularly unsettled years around his parents’ break-up in the mid-1970s. For their son, it is a period marked by his mother’s obliviousness and neglect, his father’s obliviousness and absence, and a dizzying itinerary of travel to hippie hot-spots such as Morocco, London, and the Greek islands.

While Irving floats in the poetic ether, and Aviva follows her bliss, Layton is left on the cold, hard ground, dutifully awaiting his parents’ return to earth. The experience takes its toll: even an extended stay in Toronto’s Forest Hill Village, where his mother experiments with bourgeois respectability and home ownership, can’t calm the boy’s feelings of instability, mistrust, and loneliness. When Layton’s rage eventually explodes, he’s dosed into docility with Ritalin.

There are profoundly disturbing moments of parental negligence in the book, including emotional and literal abandonment. But Layton does not write with the vituperativeness of a wronged child. His narration combines adult distance and wisdom with the powerful intuitions of childhood. He discovers the dark humour in his family situation without diluting its often appalling reality, and translates wonderfully surreal moments such as a family dinner featuring an enraged Irving, a seductive Leonard Cohen, and a sulking Layton in full hockey gear. What might have been a repetitive list of unnerving events and exotic locales takes on a hypnotic momentum through Layton’s trenchant writing, giving the memoir the form and texture of a good novel. That this is a true story – Layton’s version, at least – becomes almost incidental. Almost.