Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter, By Jenni Murray

The broadcaster writes about loss and cancer

Jenni Murray discovered she had breast cancer at the end of 2006. On her way to see her oncologist, she learned that her mother had died, of Parkinson's disease. Within the next three weeks, keeping her own condition secret from her stricken father, she had undergone a mastectomy and managed to read the eulogy at her mother' s funeral.

It was heroic, but by no means the end of her troubles. The cancer was further advanced than she had realised and chemotherapy followed. Meanwhile her adored father, in his turn, had been trying to keep from her the fact that he too had cancer, of the lung, from which he died the following June.

Jenni Murray is a very public figure. Besides her other journalism, she has presented Radio 4's Woman's Hour since 1987. The programme had frequently visited the subject of breast cancer and she bravely decided to go public when her own condition was diagnosed. And she returned to work fast, slotting in broadcasting between sessions of debilitating treatment and visits to her father. The chemicals had caused her to gain weight and lose her hair but, "the great thing about being on the radio" she gamely asserts, "is that you don't have to look your best".

As far as such things can be, it is all over now. Murray is on a five-year course of medication but, as she assured her radio audience, her prospects are good. Any new listener to the programme today would have no inkling of the presenter's own recent traumas.

Her intimate, confessional book takes the form of a diary of the terrible year leading up to her father's death, intercut with reminiscence. Each of the 12 chapters begins with the events of a different month, starting with a July visit to the hospital where her mother is raging with furious impotence against her fate, and her father is quietly sobbing. But then, every chapter, the writing slips into the past and Murray tells the story of her own life, and what she knows of her parents' lives, beginning with their meeting in 1944.

It is subtly and seductively constructed. Each period of autobiography is consecutive, yet prompted by an event, a photograph or a remark in the diary. The joins don't show, yet the two narratives run parallel and each carries a powerful momentum. Though we know it is coming, the description of her father's death, very near the end of the book, is as powerfully raw and moving as anything I've ever read.

The title, however, is relevant. Murray was not always dutiful. If every mother-daughter relationship is tricky, hers was trickier than most. An only child, she inherited her father's large frame and her petite mother never let her forget it. When work took her father abroad, her mother went too, leaving Murray with indulgent grandparents and returning only to crack the whip at every teenage infringement – however mild – of her strict laws of propriety and decency.

Murray beats herself up, saying she'd been an intellectual snob, a liar, "a difficult, spoilt little madam". Simultaneously, she blames her mother, sometimes – it seems – unfairly. The reigning babycare guru at the time of her birth was Truby King, who advised strict four-hourly feeds: can that regime really be to blame for the child's subsequent need always to have something in her mouth – a thumb, Biros, cigarettes, food? Are mothers, as she suggests, inevitably jealous of daughters? She goes further, asserting that "all mothers hate their daughters from the word go". If she really believes that, it's lucky that she herself had sons.

In spite of all this, the book's opening words, "I feel I am beginning a love-letter..." ring true and, luckily, mother and daughter eventually manage to express their painful, mutual love, along with their rueful acknowledgement of a certain similarity. In a strange, sad postscript, Murray describes her discovery, on her return to London, of a terrified Polish squatter in her flat. Furious, she summons the police and he is marched off in handcuffs, but not before, at her insistence, he has thoroughly cleared the place up. As the echo of her own harsh, imperious words fades, she has a grim moment of truth as she recognises that voice: it is, indeed, her mother's.