Anderson shows that Franklin's incomplete story exploits the disorderly and disruptive state of a lived life, as opposed to striving for the meticulous finish of standard memoirs, biographies, and histories.
Not at all the standard recovery memoir, it has real literary depth and complexity of construction without seeming in any way contrived.
In times gone by, the standard police memoir involved Inspector Knacker of the Yard reminiscing about his arrest of Jimmy "the Slag" Butcher outside the Dead Ferret in Soho.
Frey attributes the distance between his dramatic, bestselling narrative and his verifiable life to the failures of an addled memory and, more to the point, to the slippery standards of memoir.
Now, writing in pencil, or dictating to a secretary, he began to compose the book that many commentators agree sets the gold standard for presidential memoirs.
Alongside this pair Chris Evans's second instalment, Memoirs of a Fruitcake (HarperCollins, £20), seems a little staid, but by showbiz memoir standards his account of his journey from restless, boozy egomaniac to contented father and Radio 2 DJ – with a short-lived, eyebrow-raising marriage to Billie Piper en route – is winningly candid.
This squashes the multiplicity of working-class experience into a few standard tropes: the misery memoir, the escape, the clever boy or girl "done good".
William Zinsser, who is the author of "Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past," said on Sunday that publishers have had a "slippery" standard for accuracy in memoirs.
Perhaps that's too much to ask, these days, of a first novel that certainly offers much more than the usual fare: those standard-issue teenage memoirs, thinly disguised as fiction and written in the cadences and vocabulary of a primary-school phonetics workbook.
