Borrowed Finery: a memoir by Paula Fox

Oh no! Not another unhappy childhood...

Elizabeth Bowen remarked that the charm of memory lay in chance, which "rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust." This applies to many recent memoirs, which are narrow in focus, almost parochial.

Yet memoirs have never had it so good. The worse the life – sexual abuse, drug addiction – the better the material. Now Paula Fox's Borrowed Finery comes winging across the Atlantic complete with praise for its eloquence and power.

Why do people write memoirs? It is because they hope to serve as inspiration, or because, in overcoming hardship, they want recognition? Is it to make permanent something fleeting, to explain things that eluded them? Are memoirs creative works or acts of therapy? Sometimes it seems a thin dividing line.

The award-winning children's author Paula Fox was born in 1923. Within days, her glamorous and feckless parents dumped her in a Manhattan orphanage. Her Spanish grandmother rescued her and, briefly, Fox lived with a kindly but impoverished minister in upstate New York.

Reclaimed once more by her grandmother, Fox was dragged off to Cuba, to the home of a rich lunatic relation. Back again she went to New York. Each new arrangement was punctuated by visits from her parents – except for four years, from seven to 11, when she didn't see them at all.

Her hard-drinking father, Paul Fox, was a Hollywood screenwriter, responsible for The Last Train to Madrid (described by Graham Greene as "the worst movie I ever saw"). But Fox's relationship with her mother Elsie is the key. From the moment she gave birth, at 19, Elsie disliked her daughter.

Elsie was both ferocious and indifferent. On one occasion, when Paula complained of toothache, her mother strapped her in the back of a car and drove maniacally around Malibu, so the child was shaken like a rattle. Meeting Paula to buy her shoes, Elsie made the purchase, then told the girl to find her own way home across New York.

In this bewildering world Fox meets John Gilbert, Buster Keaton and Orson Welles. She recalls her three uncles, her grandmother and various best friends: temporary fixtures in a random life. She can be very insightful. Introducing her to James Cagney, her father seems apologetic: "I thought of how the notability of a man turns everyone around him into beggars."

There's the tiniest glimpse of something quirky beneath Elsie's brittle veneer. Reading a story about farmers shooting coyotes, she exclaims, "Why not arm the coyotes?" Fox didn't see her mother for 38 years. When Elsie died aged 92, Fox felt she had lost "a daughter's last privilege, I couldn't mourn my mother."

Borrowed Finery keeps us at a distance. There's also a tension between the awful content and the bald, dispassionate way it's related. When Fox tells of being reunited with her own daughter (put up for adoption when she was 21), you feel years of unwept tears. Maybe it all feels too long ago, as if it happened to someone else. Or is Fox aware that if she exposed her true anguish, she might never stem the emotional floodwaters? Whichever, the result is oddly unmoving.