In Dreamtime Alice, Sayer’s father recounts the loss of his virginity, his daughter’s conception, his wet dreams, his drug highs, his failed schemes – a staccato rhythm of self-creating storytelling. Her mother, in contrast, ‘is shut up tight … the antithesis of my verbose father’. In Sayer’s new memoir, Velocity, the life of this silent woman moves to the foreground.

Velocity begins with a series of family stories that will be familiar to readers of Dreamtime Alice, padded with the kind of domestic incidents that are the stuff of most childhoods. One suspects they have become the butt of a canny publisher’s way of wringing more sales from a successful book (Dreamtime Alice won the National Biography Award). By Chapter Six, however, things have taken a new turn with the arrival of Sayer’s mother’s violent lover, Hakkim. This past was alluded to in the first memoir, but its terror looms over Velocity. Progressively abandoned by her older siblings and father, Mandy, now eleven, is left defenceless in the face of Hakkim’s jealous rages. Perhaps Tolstoy had it the wrong way round, as the movements of this tale of unhappy family life are sadly familiar: the cycles of violence and respite; the child forced into the role of adult; her refuge in art.

It is from her mother’s world of failed relationships and daytime television, watched under the haze of cigarettes and sherry, that Sayer runs into the arms of her father. In his passion for music, his affection and his humour, he possesses all the charm that her mother lacks. Velocity slips into the long tradition of childhood memoirs that feature alluring, adventurous, absent fathers. The love Sayer feels for her father is vivid, as is her sense that in him, with his relish of an urban underworld of larrikins and artists, she has found her true home. However, the maternal inheritance, while unacknowledged, seems significant. The Mandy of Dreamtime Alice is marked by a passivity that seemed at odds with her risk-taking, but not when read against Velocity. There are sharper echoes of her mother in Sayer’s acceptance of a violent lover and in the climactic appearance of a husband who will finally make everything all right (this Victorian trope is quietly undone by husband number one’s disappearance and replacement by a new love in Velocity). While most children like to imagine they have made a decisive break with their parents, the better memoirists train their eyes on the ways we also endlessly retrace their paths.

The refusal to examine these maternal connections is indicative of the deeper problem of Velocity, one that is related to tone. Sayer’s light, vivacious style can, in both memoirs, lapse into sloppiness: phrases repeated within a page; the same descriptions papered onto different characters. Her writing is at its richest when it explores sensuality, with a mix of lyricism and earthiness that is a particularly Australian signature. More significantly, however, is that while Sayer’s chattiness fits the breezy tale of a young woman coming into selfhood among magicians and dime-store drop-outs, it is inadequate to the stories of her childhood. One of the striking features of Dreamtime Alice is its lack of bitterness. Sayer has inherited her father’s The Show Must Go On bravado, a willed openness to the possibilities that she trusts must be waiting just round some corner. But amid the descriptions of her mother’s drunkenness and suicide attempts, of Hakkim eating a smashed beer glass in wordless rage, of his bloodying Sayer’s nose and slamming her against a wall, I was left asking, where is the grief, her anger? The sheer insistence on storytelling may provide a clue, but this isn’t Sayer’s style: she is no minimalist; hers is not the manner of neutral, steady reportage but of emotional rumination. Yet the reflections on her mother’s acceptance of a violent relationship are scant and thin: ‘I wondered why she seemed so distant and unhappy … I could only attribute her behaviour to loneliness.’ Or when pondering the treatment she herself receives from both her parents: ‘As I walked along the beach with Joanne, I tried to figure out why my father had lied, why my mother kept so much from us, and came to the conclusion that maintaining a long silence or telling a fib can occasionally seem like the right thing to do.’ Maybe a child can go no deeper than this, but the adult must, and by not doing so the narrator, despite her candour on sex and creativity, remains hidden. The blank cheeriness with which both memoirs are told ultimately seems of a piece with the clown makeup Sayer applies at the end of Velocity; ironically, the language of determined optimism reveals more about the author’s character than she does directly.

In many ways, we approach biography and fiction differently. With memoirs, we need to be convinced that we are reading the truth, either through seeming frankness or, less commonly but equally effectively, through a bravura performance of self-conception (think of Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? And Philip Roth’s The Facts, respectively). The reader of modern memoir doesn’t seek to play the therapist, but does want insight; in a memoir of childhood, this means being shown how the adult now accords with the child. It is not enough to recount the stories of childhood, especially when they are as harrowing as Sayer’s; there should be an attempt to come to terms with them. There are intimations of how Sayer dealt with a confusing adult world even before the appearance of Hakkim – self-inflicted violence, fits of crying, blinding headaches – and it seems that she still averts her eyes whenever the significant issues of her early life come up, preferring the boozy stories of pub shenanigans as heralded by the back blurb: ‘I knew all the beer gardens in Sydney by the time I was eight.’ These jaunty anecdotes aren’t the heart of her story, even if she wants them to be.

If ever Philip Larkin’s ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’ applied, it should be in Sayer’s case, with both parents ruled by such profound selfishness. But they didn’t. Their daughter’s memoirs are animated by a curiosity about life and a desire for its pleasures. Still, the reader is left wondering about the cost and about what isn’t said beneath all the noisy stories.