Title: I Laughed, I Cried...
Product review: I know that's a cliché, but this book had me in stitches one minute, in floods of tears the next. I don't advise reading it on the subway, where such mercurial moods tend to elicit funny looks -- not to mention the looks you get if somebody happens to glance over your shoulder at some of the more risqué pages. I do strongly advise reading it somewhere else. The outlandish events of protagonist Geoffrey Doyle's childhood are a hoot, and the author's way of drawing living, breathing characters makes even the elephant-in-the-pub episode somehow believable. Geoffrey's bizarre family relationships are both infuriating and poignant.In a way, A Relative Matter is really two books. The tone changes so much when the scene shifts to Geoffrey's adulthood that I could hardly believe I was reading about the same guy. His often self-inflicted crises and frustrations occasionally made me wish he had never grown up -- but I still couldn't put the book down.
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