Domenica Ruta's With or Without You is a touching memoir

As a parent, I am surrounded by well-meaning advice on how to give my child the best possible childhood, so it's refreshing to pick up a book that chronicles the opposite of perfection.

Domenica Ruta's memoir opens dramatically with her mother picking up a fire poker and ordering her out of the house. One anticipates violence but, while what ensues is dramatic, it is not directed at Domenica, who watches her mother smash the windscreen of another woman's car with trepidation but not terror.

The rest of the first half of the book continues in a similar vein. Ruta's mother Kathi is a single parent, a hoarder of trash, a screamer, an occasional drug pusher and a frequent user, who oscillates between gainful employment and the dole. Ruta grew up in an atmosphere of relative squalor, low-grade crime and insecurity, fending for herself from a young age, while retaining a deep emotional bond with her unpredictable mother. While one can imagine this might have been tough, the book only hints at the rigours, instead taking a matter-of-fact tone coupled with humour.

It is childhood as the child Ruta must have perceived it, with a little bit of retrospective understanding, such as when she acknowledges how she must have been viewed by her peers.

One of Kathi's redeeming qualities is that she is determined that her bookish daughter has the best education possible. Almost miraculously, she manages to produce private tuition fees and the money for extracurricular activities. While the advantages of this schooling are undeniable, they also compound Domenica's status as a misfit. Kathi also possesses the acumen to turn her new husband's taxi business around and is briefly a millionaire, but lacks the ability to save.

Having paved her daughter's way to a better life, Kathi seems determined to sabotage it as well, exhorting her teenager to get pregnant and then supplying her with pills to get high on from her own stash.