The Sunday Times memoir of the year

Miracles of Life by J G BALLARD
HarperPerennial £7.99
In subject matter alone, Ballard, right, has a ripping head start. Born in Shanghai, he was youthfully affected by the city's extravagant but cruel' complexion. As a boy during the war, he spent several peculiarly contented years in a Japanese internment camp, an experience that eventually produced his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun. As a young medical student, he furthered an interest in corpses and mortality, and on national service in Canada made his first tentative forays into fiction. In the 1950s and 1960s he witnessed first-hand the immense flourishing of modern art and literature; in the 1990s he became the darling of the film world with David Cronenberg's version of his book Crash. He writes extremely movingly about the untimely death of his first wife, Mary, and his own later battle with prostate cancer. The book is simple, elegant, and practically perfect.

The past 12 months have thrown up a slew of astonishing memoirs, starting with Julia Blackburn's jawdropping The Three of Us (Cape £16.99). As a novelist, Blackburn has twice been shortlisted for the Orange prize; as the daughter of the alcoholic poet Thomas Blackburn and his eccentric wife, the painter Rosalie de Meric, she now turns her hand to a rich account of her turbulent relationship with her sex-obsessed mother. Postdivorce, de Meric took lodgers and openly slept with all of them, often encouraging her daughter to do the same. So there's nudity and sex games and also some brilliant vignettes, such as her father's affair with Francis Bacon (“one night I briskly sodomised him”, says his diary) - not to mention, in 1999 when her mother is finally dying of cancer, a moving reconciliation. Brilliant, but not for a maiden aunt.

Another twisted threesome is to be found in Janice Galloway's This is Not About Me (Granta £16.99), which takes in the first 12 years of the novelist's life. Her 40-year-old mother initially mistook Galloway for the menopause, experiencing mixed emotions when the hot flushes in fact turned out to be a baby girl. Also piqued is her other daughter, the terrifying Cora, an unstable 21-year-old who unexpectedly moves back into their tiny council house on the west coast of Scotland, bringing a colourful stream of men with her and changing her young sister's life forever. Read it, if only for Galloway's vividly realised working-class world of penny sweets and chocolate biscuits for breakfast.

Again, it's just Jennifer, mum and dad in Jenni Murray's Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter (Bantam £14.99). The cherished only child of a civil servant and an engineer from Barnsley, Murray wrote the book in 2006, the year she lost both parents and was herself diagnosed with breast cancer. The book is first and foremost a catharsis, but it is also an interesting examination of a woman's role in the family and the ups and downs of Murray's relationship with her somewhat petulant mother. Calm, clever and compassionate, this is a Woman's Hour bumper special.

Cancer also looms large in Coda (Granta/Faber £14.99), Simon Gray's excellent account of his last nine months with lung cancer. A welldocumented lover of cigarettes, Gray awkwardly concludes that he has only himself to blame. And so, in clear, measured and often humorous tones, he stares death in the face, muses on the etiquette of having a terminal illness and pokes fun at the dilapidation of his own body. His comical account of trying and failing to go for a jog will have even the hardest hearts melting. The Last Cigarette (Granta £7.99), the previous volume of his Smoking Diaries, is also a must.

At 91, Diana Athill, the famous editor and literary doyenne, has quite other matters to get off her chest. Somewhere Towards the End (Granta £12.99) reveals a number of Athill's notorious affairs, including a ménage à trois and a long-standing romance with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckford. Part exposé, part treatise on old age, the book is a ruminative read with shades of jolly-hockey-sticks realism. Of a dangerous miscarriage she writes, “Oh well, if I die, I die.”

Even Athill might have raised an eyebrow at the antics of Fran and Jay Landesman, the wife-swapping parents of this paper's film critic, Cosmo, in his hilarious memoir of his long-suffering childhood, Starstruck (Macmillan £14.99). Through the swinging 1960s and hippie-ish 1970s, the young Landesman cuts a Saffy-like figure in the face of his cringingly fame-hungry parents, who conceive plan after plan in the hope of hitting the big time. There are outrageous parties and faddish outfits, and cameos of Peter Cook, Mick Jagger and other stars his parents scramble to hang out with. There is also a more cerebral analysis of the rise of the modern celebrity - as the ex-husband of Julie Burchill and old friend of Toby Young, Landesman is certainly well placed to speculate. Perfect for anyone with delusions of grandeur.

Which could also be said of Ever, Dirk (Weidenfeld £25), a lavish collection of Dirk Bogarde's letters deftly edited by Bogarde aficionado John Coldstream. The actor wrote compulsively, often several times a day, in spiky, bitchy, witty and chronically misspelt dispatches about fellow thesps and immediate family. Bogarde's Robert Redford is “rotten old Redford”; Mia Farrow a “wild beast under the table”; Richard Burton simply “Fatso”. It is a rich and readable selection, Bogarde's voice ever strident above the din.

Sathnam Sanghera's If You Don't Know Me by Now (Viking £16.99) is a superbly observed account of his eccentric Asian upbringing in Wolverhampton. Now a successful columnist on The Times, Sanghera returns home to unravel his family's problems and reconcile his traditional Asian roots with his flashy London lifestyle. In the process he discovers the truth about his father's schizophrenia and why his mother won't accept any English girlfriend of his. It is a funny and touching look at the experience of second-generation immigrants from both inside and outside the bubble.

Finally, to Owen Matthews's Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War (Bloomsbury £17.99), another tale of doomed love: only this time the lovers are the author's parents and the backdrop is the cold war. Going as far back as his Russian grandfather, who vanished in 1937 as a result of the Stalinist purges, Matthews details the plight of three generations of his family in brilliant, tireless detail. There's romance, drama, life and death and personal discovery. And in a memoir, who could ask for more?

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