When Mark Haddon was a child, he had such an acute phobia of deep water that when his family went on a holiday to Malta and his father decided they would “take a boat tour of a marine cave called the Blue Grotto,” he was so terrified that he “spent the entire journey crying with a towel over [his] head.” As he goes on to note, this miserable experience, combining overwhelming dread with a combination of shelter and denial, was typical of what it was like for him growing up–and, as his memoir Leaving Home frankly details, what it was often like for him as a grown up as well.

It’s hard to know exactly how to classify Leaving Home. “Memoir” doesn’t quite capture its combination of family history, personal experience, observations on imagination and creativity, and copious illustrations, including many drawings of Haddon’s own along with family photos, reproductions of paintings and graphics, and the “Weetabix” chart of the solar system. I was so engrossed in the narrative–which, despite being structured as a series of short somewhat fragmentary parts, has a lot of forward momentum–that I am actually quite sure I did not give the illustrations the attention they deserve, so something I’ll be doing before I return the book to the library is leafing through it again.

One photo that definitely made me linger in the moment is of Haddon’s mother at a beach, around the time she and his father married. “She radiates something I never saw her radiate in real life,” Haddon remarks of it,

nor in any later photos, even those in which she is smiling and appears happy. It’s partly those freckles, which she came to hate, which she covered in foundation and which rarely came out in summer because she avoided the sun for fear it would trigger a migraine. But the real difference is internal. The woman on the beach seems confident in her own beauty and at ease in the world. Maybe the picture’s deceptive, but I think that soon after it was taken some kind of light died in her.

She does indeed look radiant and confident in the photograph, quite unlike the dour, oppressively conventional, critical, wholly unloving woman we get to know from the rest of Haddon’s account. After his mother is moved into an assisted living facility, she complains once to Mark that his sister Fiona rarely visits.

I decided, for once, to answer the question honestly by asking a question in return. ‘Mum, when was the last time you said something positive about, or to, Fiona?’ She bridled, but I insisted she give me an answer. She thought for a while before saying, ‘Well, I remember her bringing some homework back from school . . .’

‘That was over forty years ago.’

‘And there was a project she did at college . . .’

‘You can’t remember a single positive thing you’ve said about her, or to her, in forty years? Are you fucking surprised she doesn’t want to visit?’

Enraged, he storms out. “Mum never referred to the conversation again.” That kind of emotional neglect would be bad enough, but there’s more, worse: “Both Mum and Dad dismissed the multiple sexual assaults from which [Fiona] suffered”; when Fiona is hospitalized with meningitis, neither of her parents visit her; dying, Mum says to Fiona, her last words to her daughter, ‘I’ve never believed a word you’ve said.'” “We assume it’s hard when a loved and loving parent dies,” observes Haddon,

but it can be just as hard when you lose a parent whom you don’t love and who never loved you. When Mum and Dad died it was a relief for me. For my sister it was the moment when she knew for certain that she would never hear them say sorry.”

We learn a lot about “Mum and Dad” in Leaving Home, and about their parents, Mark and Fiona’s grandparents, as well. Unsurprisingly, given the kind of people, or at least the kind of parents, they were, their son’s account of them is not particularly tender or kind or forgiving. It is, occasionally, understanding, and Haddon does do what he can–as with that photo of his mother–to show them to us as real people, complicated and flawed. Does he owe them anything more than that, especially now that they are both dead and unable to offer their own versions of their stories? “What does it mean,” he asks at one point, “the injunction to not speak ill of the dead? Which dead? For how long after their passing are we meant to hold our tongues? And does speaking ill mean telling lies or telling the truth?” Leaving Home is, unsparingly, the truth as Haddon sees it about two people who taught him by negative example everything he himself has tried to be as a parent:

I’ve not been a perfect father. I’ve been bad-tempered, impatient and oversensitive when wrestling with problems of my own, but I”ve always tried hard to be a good one, and I’ve been guided in part by the cautionary example set by my own parents. Talk to your children. Listen to them. Say sorry when you make mistakes. Wish for them to be happy and kind and to find something that excites them. If you can, give them the tools to do these things. Don’t expect them to fulfil your ambitions or settle your debts.

Leaving Home is not just a litany of grievances, though (however justified they are), and it does not read like an angry settling of scores. It’s a reflection on Haddon’s own life, framed by the aging and deaths of the two people who might have made it a happier, safer one but didn’t. He talks about the freedom and joy he found in reading, and then in writing, and with his wife and his own children. He talks about his struggles with his mental health, including his ‘cutting’ (there’s a photo related to that topic which is not great to come upon unprepared), his heart surgery, his wife’s terrifying experience of being hit by a car at 6 months pregnant. There’s quite a bit about a very strange sounding Swedish TV series called Jordskott, which he says he finds “profoundly consoling” and has watched all the way through four times.

And there are moments of peace, in his life and in the book, like this one, when Haddon finds himself free for once of his terror of the deep:

Years later I was running regularly up the Thames. Godstow, King’s Lock, Eynsham, Babcock Hythe. It was shame that did it in the end, the realization that I was running beside this beautiful outdoor pool and missing something very special on every occasion. So one July afternoon, nearing home, I caught myself by surprise, stopped beside the river on Port Meadow, stripped down to my running shorts and walked in. It remains with me as a moment of revelation. Hopkins’s Binsey poplars shimmering overhead and the sun going down, monumental peach-coloured clouds. Swallows, midges, Canada geese, cows at the water’s edge. A C-17 banks over Wytham making its final approach into Brize Norton, all that suspended tonnage a kind of miracle. Being inside the landscape. And the fear gone.

You can’t outrun your past, but Leaving Home shows that you can make something pretty remarkable out of your memories, even the grim ones.