Another gem recommended to me by Powell's Indiespensable, and while at times I was frustrated with the memoirist, With or Without You fits in to the perfect medium between historical figure memoir and tell-all. Domenica Ruta chooses to open her memoir with a scene where she is riding in a car with her mother. Her mother, Kathi, has a baseball bat and proceeds to stop to bash in the windshield of a rival's car. Kathi and her dubious choices form the major events within this memoir, from the taxi driver future husband to drug dealer roommates and her harassment of Ruta once Ruta decides to leave her mother's home. At the same time as the readers learn of Kathi's outrageous behavior, they are also shown a complex mother-daughter relationship where Ruta obviously still cares for her mother despite her out of control behavior. Kathi does not become a wholly unsympathetic figure until the end of the memoir, which was about when I'd begun to grown tired of anecdotes of her behavior beginning to harm or embarrass Ruta. While all children known the feeling of being embarrassed by their parents, the end the complex relationship that had been previously portrayed turned into Ruta's story of trying to break away from her parents and strike out on her own. Ruta's mother is certainly cringe-worthy, and how Ruta makes this relationship work for as along as it can makes this memoir worth reading.