Autobiography still sounds to me like something you do to yourself when you know you shouldn’t, a rough equivalent of self-inflicted dentistry. It’s an otherwise problematic word, too – in the word biography there’s an empty promise of totality, while auto unfairly suggests a mechanical means of production. Which is perhaps why memoir is a better word, gentler by far, non-presumptuous, suggesting a smaller, reflective surface.

Any way you name it, the form has a bit of a beleaguered past in this country. As George Woodcock has written, the early history of the Canadian memoir features “a notable mediocrity,” with “a very high proportion [telling] of uninteresting lives (with perhaps here and there a sudden illumination for the social historian) in uninteresting ways.”

Those kinds of books are still being published, as are their close cousins, memoirs that report on potentially fascinating lives in spectacularly uninteresting ways. (Shallow as a plate of water, Kim Campbell’s Time and Chance stands to the fore.)

So what’s wrong with us as autobiographers? Nothing; no alarms or emergency measures are called for. Once you go looking for worthy Canadian memoirs, they crop up in number. Some of the best, not surprisingly, are the works of distinguished novelists – Margaret Laurence’s The Prophet’s Camel Bell or The Street by Mordecai Richler – or have otherwise gifted writers behind them: In Pursuit of Coleridge by Kathleen Coburn, The Danger Tree by David Macfarlane, Wordstruck by Robert MacNeil. Some are more surprising: think of diplomat Charles Ritchie’s elegant journals or, if you want a politician, Joey Smallwood and I Chose Canada.

Add Bruce McCall’s remarkable new memoir to these ranks. Deftly anecdotal and self-deprecating, marvellous in its detailed portraiture of what this country looked like to a boy 40 years ago, it’s called Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada, although I Repudiated Canada would work just as well. A funny fixture as both a writer and an illustrator in American magazines including The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, McCall is, as he puts it, “a son of the Maple Leaf,” but he hasn’t lived here for 35 years. He abandoned Canada in 1962, easily, finally. For him, the past truly is another country – as it turns out, a very painful one.

Toronto the Good was the unironic name that the city by the side of Lake Ontario got for itself in the late 1940s by dint of a reputation for clean-swept streets, Christian piety, and generally upright civic character. But Toronto was never that good to the writer and artist Bruce McCall; the city he inhabited in mid-century, on the verge of teenage, was more like Toronto the Oppressive, the Dead Boring, the Graveyard of Dreams. McCall hated the place, couldn’t get out soon enough – although, as comes clear, the city’s guilt was mostly one of association. Thin Ice and its story of a poisoned past is a tragedy of parenthood acted out on Canadian soil.

Before Toronto, there was Simcoe, the small Ontario town between London and Hamilton where Bruce originated, one of six children born to Tom and Peg McCall. That in itself was a mystery, one that remains unsolved: the couple seems not only to have been utterly unsuited for the role of parents but actively resentful at having found themselves cast into it. Tom especially. Professionally, he eventually rose to be Ontario’s deputy minister of travel and publicity. Domestically, he acted as if he’d been trapped (six times over) into fatherhood. In revenge, he waged a household war of cold silence, lashing blame, and cruel inattention against his family. Peg’s war, meanwhile, was with loneliness and despair: unable to cope with an angry husband and a houseful of children, she sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism.

Ignored, bullied, the victims of emotional abandonment in the first degree: it’s astonishing that the McCall children didn’t all end up criminally intent on revenge. Instead, they found means of escape. The oldest brother left home to join the navy. If Bruce, who was 12 in 1947 when the family moved from Simcoe to Toronto, couldn’t leave home outright, he found distractions in frenzied creativity (he was always drawing), in cars, in hockey, and – especially – in all things American.

It’s easier now for McCall to read the psychology of his fixation on the United States. To a young boy, misery wasn’t localized at the “tiny five-room behavioral sink of an apartment” that was home: Toronto itself was the “grey urban nowhere” that was the scene of his parents’ crimes against him and his brothers and sisters. Canada at large was no better: it seemed as drab, low-ceilinged, and oppressive as the McCall apartment itself.

In The New Yorker, nowadays, McCall’s usually to be found at the back of the book, where they let him and fellow funny talents like Calvin Trillin and Christopher Buckley do whatever they please. If you want more psychology, you’re welcome to postulate about how much pain McCall continues to hide behind his sense of humour.

And yet Thin Ice doesn’t feel like a book that’s hiding anything. There’s plenty of bitterness (and some of it, when it comes to Canada, is gratuitously clichéd), but it’s not, finally, a bitter book. Nor does McCall strain to arrange for a triumphant, redemptive ending. And if it feels as if he finds something approaching peace and perspective, maybe that’s just proof that while the past may be another country that is never really understood, you can go home again with grace and sympathy.