At the beginning of Molly McCloy's new memoir, Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth (Red Hen Press; 264 pages), the author lays out the stakes. She's about to graduate from Evergreen State College and feels deep resentment toward her distant father. When Molly and her two brothers were growing up in Phoenix in the early 1980s, their father abused them, both emotionally and physically. So, Molly decides to write her father two letters: one offering him the chance to work on their relationship, and a second asking him to apologize for nine specific grudges she holds about his treatment of her during childhood. The memoir then follows these grudges through specific stories that blend raw honesty with biting humor until her father eventually writes back./

What makes the memoir succeed is that the three McCloy children are (and I mean no disrespect) kind of little shits. Young Molly bullies a boy at school over a lost football, and she's prone to fighting. As children, all three sneak out at in the middle of the night. Tom started smoking weed in fourth grade, and eventually both brothers become addicted to heroin. None of this justifies the abuse inflicted by their father, but it adds layers to a family life the children themselves would describe as "fucked up." Even so, we inevitably cheer for each of them, desperately wanting them all to end up as happy as Molly suggests in the novel's subtitle. We want her brothers to get clean, and her father to eventually work through his violent tendencies, because as readers, we understand that no one in this book completely good, and despite what the young McCloy children believe, no one is purely evil. The memoir also does well to address the development of Molly's queer identity, and how it shapes her perspective. Her openness about being gay is woven through story, and it helps her find both empowerment and humor in her own experiences. It's integral to her sense of self and offers readers an authentic depiction of queerness that is neither tokenized nor sidelined

While the focus is often on the McCloy children, who at times are at odds with each other but also band together to commiserate about their father, other characters mingle through the book—friends and lovers who rarely stay long—to help paint the scenes vividly and add layers to the main characters. We meet Adine, a tough fourth-grader and Molly's first real female friend, until Molly accidentally snitches on her for bringing weed to school. Kelly often wrestles teenage Molly, helps Molly "borrow" the family van for an adventure, and gives Molly a sexual awakening in more ways than one. Anna, meanwhile, is Molly's friend whose mom often disappears to Reno, leaving Anna with a group of bikers and opening her up to ridicule from the McCloys for having a "gay hooker" for a mother (and whose mother also invited Molly's mom to a vibrator party). Even when characters serve a single purpose, they never do it in a basic, flippant way.

It's easy to envision a memoir with a similar storyline failing, but Nine Grudges succeeds because it knows exactly what it's doing. When viewed from the big picture, there's a risk that a grown child seeking an apology from her abusive father would come off as cloying or overly wholesome. Even the author anticipates that possibility when she writes fondly about her brothers: "Without Jake and Tom I would be a pansy. A pushover. Without them I would've written some book called The Nine Apologies, a pile of tripe exalting my dad as a superhero." The field of family trauma memoirs is crowded, and many of them recount difficult upbringings. They often lean into melodrama (Jane Elliott's The Little Prisoner comes to mind) or chase redemption arcs (think Tara Westover's Educated). Thankfully, that's not the case here, largely because of the outstanding characters populating the pages. Nine Grudges stands out by refusing easy resolutions, shying away from the sentimentality of some of its peers.

McCloy's prose is easy to read, witty, and irreverent. It rarely gets bogged down in superfluous detail and moves at an accelerated pace. The characters themselves often drop jokes, particularly at inopportune times. For instance, Molly reflects on a recurring moment when she and her brothers consider their abuse as teenagers: "After explicating some brutal moment, one of us pauses and says, 'At least he never tried to fuck us.' We never laugh at this hey-it-could-have-been-worse joke. We shake our heads with sage-like weariness, roll our eyes, and let out a long groan. Oh, Dad, you hopeless asshole. He never molested us. He'd met that low bar." The prose takes us through a range of emotions, from vulnerability to sadness to heartbreak, but never veers too far into emotional territory, using humor as a defense mechanism to the reader's delight.

Despite the many entertaining scenes, the book isn't afraid to address the different ways abuse can manifest and how it gets passed down through generations. It often notes that Molly's father was beaten as a child, sometimes with a two-by-four, and the family's lone visit to those grandparents reveals them to be miserable religious hypocrites. Their father's upbringing is often pointed to as a justification for his inability to parent and for how it makes him prone to anger. But the author reminds us that breaking generational cycles of abuse is difficult. She also makes clear that her anger is justified, and in one of her letters, she aims to break that cycle herself. As she notes early in the book, "Grudges are empowering for kids. Why settle for self-expression? Why sing about your problems in a reedy voice when you can rage through the world like a badass avenger?" We learn the different ways that abuse itself can develop, from physical violence to demeaning language to actions without words meant to belittle people. As we see in the second grudge, abuse can be a single, loaded sentence.

Before jumping into Nine Grudges, it's helpful to know what the book is not. Though McCloy's father surprisingly responds to her letters, the memoir does not offer a Hallmark-movie ending. It is a nuanced story that shows how a family can be shaped by unsolved pain, but also demonstrates the way that people can use humor and honesty to deal with such pain. We do get a sense of resolution, as the book ends close to the present day, though some readers may still want more finality (the brothers, are they okay now?) It also needs to be said that readers who might shy away from the zoomed-out synopsis of the memoir—a book about parental abuse and, according to the book's subtitle, "The spiteful originals of the happiest dyke on earth"—for individual preconceptions or because they don't prefer the genre as a whole are missing out. Nine Grudges is an excellent portrayal of a life lived fully, and absolutely worth the read.