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Jeannette Walls had the kind of parents that make even the freakiest families on Wife Swap look like saints.

These are the kind of people who let their 3 year-old cook hot dogs, and when she catches on fire and has to get skin grafts, they end up breaking her out of the hospital. They are the types that put three kids and a newborn in the back of a U-Haul truck and don't notice that the back gate flies open as they speed down the highway. They spend every cent on booze and food for themselves while their kids don't have one decent pair of shoes and root through trash cans at school for something to eat. They tell their daughter that her near sexual assault is just a "perceived crime." They blow every chance they get, from inheriting a home and letting it be overrun by roaches and termites and vagrants, they lose job after job after job before finally settling in some holler in West Virginia that probably made Loretta Lynn's childhood home look like a mansion. The whole book is a series of bad choices and disasters, and everything keeps getting worse.

Amazingly - especially among today's writers - Walls never once sinks in to bathos. She never even tells us what she herself was feeling. She describes her family dysfunction and triumph against adversity without getting in our faces. Given that so many writers lately are emotionally manipulative, there was a huge feeling of liberation in having an emotionally absent narrator. Combine that with great writing and you've got an official unputdownable book.

Kicked ass.