A confession: I have been a fan of Kathleen Stewart since her first novel 15 years ago. Her writing is spare and beautiful, both lush and tightly controlled. And her stories often have the element of fable or fairytale about them. They are darkly elegant, like her prose.

All of these elements are present in The After Life, her memoir of one terrible year in 1976: a year in which her mother left and she entwined herself in a harmful relationship with a cruel and charismatic boyfriend (‘someone whose secret perfume told me he was not safe’). Her brief spell in a psychiatric home after her own suicide attempt was a blessed relief, a kind of holiday from life. But don’t be dissuaded by the bleak roll-call of events and the (frankly godawful) cover.

This is a bewitching exploration of identity and upbringing, and the effects of two damaged and damaging parents. It’s about the difference between shiny surfaces and the truth that lurks beneath. Stewart’s parents brought her to the opera, lined their walls with bookshelves and bought her beautiful things. But the red-brick suburban house was also filled with guns and knives. And both parents were intensely absorbed in their own internal dramas, alternately callous and distant with their children. Stewart had to fend for herself – not just practically, but emotionally.

The really absorbing story here is internal. She perfectly recaptures the bewildering thought processes, grappling illogic and dreamy (sometimes nightmarish) inner life typical of adolescence, intensified by her complete lack of emotional anchors in the outside world. Drink it in.