There comes a moment in young adulthood when many of us decide that one or both of our parents are crazy. But then we compare notes with friends, share stories with colleagues and discover, much to our astonishment, that crazy is relative, and the bell curve in this case is plump, and that our mothers or fathers, whom we once considered uniquely deranged, are really only averagely so.

Especially after we encounter someone with a parent who is truly disturbed.

In her painful, strangely mesmerizing memoir, “An Abbreviated Life,” Ariel Leve tells the story of her childhood. It had all the trappings of privilege. She lived in a penthouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, attended private school and had “a closet full of shoes.” There was just one problem, and it trumped all else: Her mother was a colossus of melodrama. She had a towering need for attention and affirmation; she had zero impulse control. Her moods were unpredictable, terrifying. She was as stable as an airplane with one wing.

“I hate you. I love you. You’re a moron. I never said that. You’re the most important person in the world to me. I wish you were never born,” Ms. Leve writes in a sample litany, all of which could have been uttered by her mother in a single afternoon.

With minimal Googling, you can figure out just who Ms. Leve’s mother is, though the author throws a feint to disguise her. She was a poet, a novelist and the maker of a cult feminist documentary. She had outrageous parties and kept glamorous company — Andy Warhol came to her wedding reception, Robert Lowell scribbled notes on her poems, James Earl Jones came by for dinner.