The often fraught relationship between a son and his father is explored in Bernard Cooper's The Bill from My Father. Cooper takes a familiar trope - a complex and unreliable parent - and gives it a unique spin as he looks back on his family and especially the once seemingly invincible man who is now slowly sinking into dementia.

Edward Cooper was a well known Los Angeles divorce attorney whose constant philandering was hardly a secret from his sons (or presumably, his wife). Now, with his mother and all three of his older brothers dead, Bernard attempts to work out what his relationship with this difficult man means, and come to grips with his father's strong disapproval of both Bernard's choice of career (writer, rather than law, which is the field his three brothers entered, as well) and his homosexuality. And it doesn't make things any easier when his father mails him a bill for nearly 2 million dollars - the cost of raising him. This moving account is liberally leavened with humor, so that it never morphs into the oh-poor-me school of autobiography.

If you loved Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life or Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception, two other good memoirs that look back on life with a difficult father, this is the book for you.