Goddamn it I love memoirs.

Richard Russo writes about his childhood in 1960s Gloversville with his single mom and grandparents. Gloversville was a backwater, impoverished, uneducated town that his mother -a child of the Great Depression- so desperately wanted to escape. They eventually did. 
3 decades later, Russo would struggle with the guilt of leaving that town for a better life, and an inexplicable mix of feeling both like the betrayer and the betrayed. He would struggle between his love for his childhood home and the extreme aversion his mother planted in him. 
This memoir is about the effects of a lifetime of unrecognized and untreated mental illness. His mother portrayed a difficult personality and behaviors, ones that her parents wrote off as "nerves", even when they knew it was more serious than that. 
Russo wouldn't learn that she suffered from a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder until after she passed away, her life eaten by fears and anxieties. 

A slow read for sure, but an excellent one.