In a line intended to be memorable, Mandy Sayer's Prologue to Velocity (prequel to her first volume of autobiography, Dreamtime Alice) begins 'I knew all the beer gardens in Sydney by the time I was eight.' This was the 1960s, and after the pubs closed the party went back to wherever Sayer's parents, Gerry the jazz drummer and her mother Betty, were then living. There was 'dancing and laughter, and as ashtrays filled and bottles emptied, I wanted this bliss to go on forever'. Well she might have, given what was to follow in the harrowed but resilient young life that Sayer is shortly to narrate. But a problem that dogs the whole memoir has already suggested itself. What is the tone of the book? It hardly aspires to be a cautionary tale about parental fecklessness. Is it instead a story of the girl's victory over the odds, a David Copperfield-style fable (although altogether more sordid in its details) of the making of a writer? And in so far as that is so, all that Sayer endured has been turned to profit – witness the latest instalment, Velocity. In consequence, the emotional impact of the experiences that she relates and reshapes is diminished.

Sayer regards her parents with a wry affection – from an adult stance
– but matter-of-factly deals with how their behaviour damaged the child who witnessed it. Gerry was a lover of his music and of women who would eventually escape Australia with his daughter to busk on the streets of New York. Sayer's mother was beautiful enough to attract a succession of increasingly more unsuitable lovers, the most frightening and abusive of them the Lebanese-born Hakkim. But even in this long and horrible interlude Sayer's narration is deadpan, as though some capacity in her for feeling has been cauterised. Eventually her parents, 'those two great boozing nature-lovers', separated after twenty-three years of marriage: 'not even the grog and an overgrown back yard would hold them together forever'.

As their marriage collapsed (whether it ever really ended is unclear), so Mandy Sayer's troubles intensified in a repetitive pattern. She settled in one suburb and school only to be uprooted when her mother's love life suffered another predictable calamity. The family trekked from rented rooms to women's refuges, from state to state, latterly fleeing the violent Hakkim with whom Betty had a last child, whose birth almost killed her (as had drug overdoses). In Adelaide Mandy was mocked for talking 'Strine' and told to take lessons more seriously after she described life in a refuge: 'In this bunk sleeps a lesbian who is also a schizophrenic. Here we eat dinner, usually sitting on the floor. This back room is reserved for two prostitutes who live with us – the men climb in and out through the window at night.' The problem is that the teacher unwittingly has a point. How seriously did this affect Sayer? Certainly she is adept at turning her memories into raucous comic turns, as when her mother sent her for a weekend retreat that turned out to be for lesbians. There she saw naked women everywhere, besides a worker from the refuge and her Auntie Joan, dressed in jeans and blue singlet, and now calling herself 'Shannon'.

Chapters in Velocity begin with hectic, italicised summaries of what is in store for the reader by way of pain, upheaval, the increasing dishevelment of mother's and daughter's lives. These teasers – like trailers at an old Saturday matinee – certainly live up to Sayer's title. The ending is happy however, if known already from her first book. Returning to its beginning, Velocity concludes in the beer garden of the Orient Hotel in Sydney, to which Sayer tracks her father. Seeing her in the doorway, he embraces his daughter 'like someone in love'. This grace note might seem discordant after all that has happened to and between the pair of them, but Velocity – for all the squalour and despair of some of its material – always intended to end upbeat. Its completion is another stage in the author's triumphal progress.