The theme at this year's The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival is “families” and Girls of Tender Age certainly deals with some of the most challenging aspects of family life. “We are all half mad because my brother is autistic,” Mary-Ann Tirone Smith writes. But it is not the autism that is so difficult; it is the fact that there is no diagnosis. And so everyone copes the best he or she can - but there are no solutions and no help or advice.

It would have been a very different book without the murder. Tirone Smith adopts an investigative tone when describing the life of Bob Malm, who killed the quiet Irene, and this means that she also writes like a journalist when detailing her family life. This was refreshing. There is still plenty of warmth but the detachment gives her story a harder edge.

It is a controversial memoir, not because anyone disputes the facts, but because the author's approach is unusual. Perhaps when you read a memoir you do not expect to be signing up for details of a murder and execution, but I certainly felt we were given so much more, of quality, for our money.

Girls of Tender Age will be discussed in a Books group session at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in October.
(0845 5767979; cheltenhamfestivals.com)

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We read this for my book club and found ourselves bogged down in a discussion about the rights and wrongs of the approach adopted by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith. Some of us wondered if she had been too cynical and used the murder of her schoolfriend in order to make her memoir more exciting. A couple of us, myself included, thought that if this was the case, then the plan had backfired because we found the book a bit too unsettling and would have preferred not to have shared the suffering of that poor girl. However, it was a good choice of title as we argued long and hard, and marks out of ten ranged from nine to two.

Julie Fisher, southwest London

August 9, 2008

The author tells Alyson Rudd that, unlike fiction, where ambiguity often looms large, a memoir offers readers the reader a glimpse of real life, and the truth.

ALYSON RUDD Do you think you would have written a memoir had Bob Malm not existed?

MARY-ANN TIRONE SMITH Bob Malm was disappeared by the Fifties when denial was recommended as a cure for all ills, a phenomenon known as positive thinking. But his crime left a splinter of glass in my brain. He'd murdered my little friend Irene and the Fifties killed her again: “Don't think about Irene, don't talk about her. We'll just have the janitor take her desk out of row two. Now children, move up and fill in the gap.” One day, out of the blue, I heard Irene calling to be freed from limbo. I would celebrate her short life, her final act of heroism and assure a proper mourning. A memoir would show how a silenced tragedy upended a community. Ah, but everyone knows you must have a dysfunctional family to write a memoir. Mine managed to function, but it was definitely outré. Has writing so openly about your family affected your subsequent writing?

No. My novels are character-driven. The characters come to me laid bare and there is nothing they can do to keep me from making them part of an exhibit. To write openly about human nature is what I do, so I wrote openly about my family.

Were you concerned about memoir fatigue?

Girls of Tender Age hit the bookstores at the exact moment James Frey was being excoriated by Oprah [Winfrey]. This led to arenewed interest in the memoir. I benefited and enjoyed defending memoir for what it is: a remembered life. I have to say that memoir fatigue is upon us. A glut of newly published memoirists is frantically covering their tracks. How can a memoir engage a reader when it begins with a disclaimer: “I have changed the names of all the people and places. Many of the people are composites. Some events are embellished for purposes of clarification.” Egad.

Was the writing process cathartic or painful?

Neither, but it had the potential to be painful. So I duplicated Senator Hillary Clinton's defense mechanism for tolerating Bill's dalliances - compartmentalisation. This is what journalists do to write about human tragedy. Our work has nothing to do with catharsis. Imagine asking a surgeon if a mastectomy was cathartic for him. When something bothers me, I pour myself a short one - a cathartic MacAllen.

How hard was it to retrieve childhood memories?

Again, I'm a fiction writer who happened to write a memoir. Fiction writers are sponges. We absorb all and we don't miss a trick. I recover memories all the time because they are all there sitting around waiting for me to get to them. Or one of them gets impatient, becomes an image and triggers a memory. I see a horseshoe pin with a lucky penny in it. Irene was wearing that pin on the day she died. The irony of it! Irene and I are on a class field trip to the Hartford Electric Light Company. We shake hands with the vice-president of the plant. I assumed he'd look like the real Vice-President, Richard Nixon, but he looks like Big Brother Bob on Howdy Doody. Retrieving childhood memories? Easy as pie.

You tie up every loose end. Can you explain why?

When you write a novel, you conclude with ambiguity. You want your reader so caught up in your story that when she finishes the last page, she muses on what happened. She recommends the book to her book group because she wants to know what they think. She wants more from the book. The writer has fired up her imagination. But a memoir is a true story. The reader tries on the memoirist's life in return for intimate access as to how all the messes turned out. Of course, the reader can only guess as to how the memoirist feels about it all. That's not part of the deal.

The execution is related with a journalistic calmness. Did you feel calm describing it?

I spoke to the crime reporter who was present at Malm's execution. Later I read the article he'd written. He did not note his reactions. His job was to give the facts. I took inspiration from him and kept calm. When I wrote about the execution, I took on the persona of a reporter so the reader could witness a state-sponsored homicide without being side-tracked. Bob Malm, the reporter told me, was quite calm.

The key questions

The author has to “recover” her feelings for Irene. Is this a convincing process?

Could this memoir have worked without the murder?

Is the narrative cluttered with characters or enriched by them?

Did the book affect your views on the death penalty?

This is a memoir and yes, I do know that many book clubs around the country have imposed a ban on them. But Girls of Tender Age is very different from the standard memoir.

Mary-Ann Tirone Smith was brought up on a low-income housing estate in 1950s Connecticut. Her family is large; an eccentric mix of French and Italian. Mary-Ann's brother, Tyler, has severe autism but nobody knows about autism yet so the family tiptoe around him. She is not allowed to cry because if she does, her brother will chew off his hand.

Interspersed between chapters about her mother being fired for getting married and racism in the local factory, Tirone Smith includes snippets about a boy living on the other side of the country. The lad is Bob Malm, who was adopted as a baby but told about that only when he was arrested, aged 12, for molesting a little girl. Malm is a dark shadow moving towards her childhood and by the time he meets Irene, Mary-Ann's schoolmate, there is almost unbearable anxiety.

Tirone Smith has a journalistic style and she details some gruesome events. But because she does not wring the emotion out of them, they do not make the book an upsetting read. Unsurprisingly, her peculiar childhood has prompted a strange memoir. And while it may be unusual, it is also absorbing and fascinating - and worth breaking the no memoirs rule for.

Girls of Tender Age by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith
Allison & Busby, £6.79 Buy the book here

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