A misery memoir from Alan Cumming that's surprisingly thoughtful

Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-style erotica, what keep the tills ringing are misery memoirs. The shelves are groaning with them. Their titles can vary from the merely toe-curling (Cry Silent Tears) to the queasily exploitative (Please, Daddy, No), but even if the names of the characters vary, all these books share the same basic plot. A child is horribly abused in some way, but eventually manages to break free from its upbringing, like a chick hatching from an egg. Good comes out of bad. They are heart-warming, therapeutic and ruthlessly commercial books that use one person’s unhappiness as an opportunity to make a lot of other people very happy indeed, especially the accountants at big publishing houses.

In some respects Alan Cumming’s memoir slips into the genre like a hand into a glove. The cover blurb informs readers that it is ‘a powerful story about embracing the best aspects of the past and triumphantly pushing the darkness aside’, and as with many similar memoirs one senses a tape recorder in the background. On this occasion the villain is Alan Cumming’s father. Having married a woman named Darling, most people would have hugged themselves with delight at the chance to combine their names, which in this case would have meant their son growing up to become the Hollywood and Broadway star Alan Cumming-Darling.

Sadly, a sense of humour was just one of the qualities that the elder Mr Cumming lacked. Some of the others included fairness, generosity, loyalty and a capacity to love anyone weaker than himself. Having realised early on that Alan was not the son he wanted, he set out to destroy his childhood with cruel efficiency, often finding novel ways to cause maximum unhappiness with minimum effort.