The tale of a family affected by alcoholism and a doomed literary career Fiction Ruined My Family isn't quite your usual memoir. With tales of severe alcoholism, unique family members and personal experiences it has a lot of fun with topics that are usually pretty tinged with anger and sadness.

This is probably one of the more original memoirs you'll find not because it differs much in its subject matter so much as that the author is able to spend most of the book poking fun at the bizarre and often embarrassing moments both she and her family members go through over the years. While I'm not sure that Darst managed to reach too many major conclusions about her family or her own life by the end of the book she does manage to make the trip pretty fun.