During her long career as a journalist, broadcaster and, for the past 21 years, the presenter of Radio 4's Woman's Hour, Jenni Murray has provided her audience with a bracing quantity of intellectual roughage. She alarmed the Daily Mail by quoting Mary Wollstonecraft's description of marriage as “legalised prostitution”. With her husband, David, she was a pioneer of domestic role reversal - she went out to work, he took primary responsibility for the care of their two sons. She made a documentary on the right to die, of which she is an advocate, and discussed with courageous frankness her recent breast cancer and its gruelling treatment. Now, in her Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter, she has exposed a hitherto unsuspected lacuna in the English language.

Who would have thought we needed different words to express the concepts of being the daughter of one's mother, and the daughter of one's father? Yet Murray's memoir demands just such a pair of neologisms to express the different qualities of her relations with her mother, Win, and her father, Alvin, to whose joint memory the book is dedicated.

Murray was born in Barnsley in 1950, from a line of strong, ambitious Yorkshirewomen and quiet, self-possessed men. Things got off to a bad start between the infant and her young mother, who suffered an agonising labour and a botched forceps delivery that left her too damaged to contemplate another pregnancy, though she longed for a son and had named her unborn baby “David Robert”.

The liberal child-rearing methods of Dr Benjamin Spock had not yet reached Barnsley, so little Jennifer (mother reckoned Jenni was “a cow's name”) was raised according to the strict principles of Truby King, who demanded a routine of fearsome rigour. There is a furiously comic scene in which Murray reports her father's story of how he and her grandfather were left to baby-sit while her mother popped out. On no account, they were told, were they to violate the principles of King by looking in on the baby, however much she howled. Sure enough, from upstairs came the sound of terrible screams. After half an hour, they could stand it no longer. “Bugger the book,” said grandpa, and they rushed in to find the baby with her head stuck between the bars of her cot.

Whether because of King, or because of a certain resemblance that Murray can only with difficulty acknowledge, the story of her relationship with her mother is one of a painful struggle between love and hatred - a violent contrast to the almost unclouded approval, affection and support that she received from the father to whom she was a more than dutiful daughter.

Murray's account of the triangular relationship between herself and her parents is contained within the framework of a diary of the terrible 12 months from July 2006 to the summer of 2007 - a year in which she lost both parents and, while trying to support them and raging against the inadequacies of care for the old and dying (she describes a meeting with healthcare professionals as “like facing a McCarthyite investigations committee”), was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy and subsequent chemotherapy,

Part evocation of a Yorkshire childhood of a cosy if confining respectability now all but extinct (there are striking vignettes of a pre-automatic washday and of her house-proud mother's remarkable cooking), and part reminiscence of her career in journalism, the book tackles Murray's conflicts with her mother, her own illness and the dreadful sadness of both her parents' deaths with striking courage and compassion.

The reference in the title is to Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Murray sees similarities between her circumstances and de Beauvoir's, and writes that it was from de Beauvoir's account of her own mother's death that she learnt to understand “why my mother behaved towards me as she did”. Murray is less fluently introspective than de Beauvoir, however. She tells her story with admirable candour, in clear, workmanlike prose but with a slight edge of detachment, like an extremely good reporter at the scene of a tragedy - which, in effect, was precisely her position during the writing of her memoir. It is scarcely a criticism to say that perhaps only a sensibility with the force of de Beauvoir's could subdue into narrative all the resonances involved in the process of becoming a dutiful (and not so dutiful) daughter.

Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter by Jenni Murray
Bantam Press £14.99 pp320

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