As this memoir recounts, Richard Russo was raised by his mother Jean on Helwig Street in Gloversville, a small town in upstate New York. His father was a drinker and gambler who lived locally but contributed little or nothing to the boy's upkeep. Russo senior would sometimes try to make a scene when Jean returned home from a date. He was so easily distracted by a round of drinks or a hand of cards that sometimes the best he could do was shouting up at her windows in the middle of the night.

Richard chose to study in Arizona rather than nearer home, and part of his thinking may have been to strike out on his own. His mother, though, quit her job and came with him, confident that she would be able to make her way. It was 1967. They drove west in an underpowered car, not sharing the driving. Russo had only recently got his licence and his mother had never learned.

This mixture of enterprise and helplessness was characteristic. The Jean he knew in his childhood was lively, hard-working and devoted to him. She liked male company and attracted it. Though she made a great show of independence, it seems likely that she was hoping to meet someone who would allow her to cling just a little. In the meantime she clung to her son, to "Ricko-Mio", to her rock.

Arizona worked out for him  he became an academic and teacher, he married a local woman from a family as large as his was small. It didn't work out for Jean. She managed to drive back east on a temporary driver's licence, but never really settled. When she was away from Gloversville it represented safety, but if ever she moved back there she felt trapped.

Russo had more contact with his father once he grew up. Russo Sr regretted that he hadn't been more available to his son, claiming that Jean's instability made it impossible. Naturally, this version of the past minimised the impact of his own vices.

A loyal and supportive son who has no way of knowing that there are aspects of his mother's predicament he can hardly be expected to cope with  in fiction, this would be a fertile starting point. In a memoir it proves hard to manage. If Jean's behaviour wasn't under her control then there's nothing to be learned from it, and no virtue in recounting the repetitive crises.

She had a phobia about yellow, so that if her preferred brand of tissues was only available in that colour she would be transfixed with repulsion in the supermarket. With this information on page 22, rather than 222, the book would announce itself as a case history of some description.

Anyone who writes a memoir about a dead parent needs to be aware of an element of taking revenge, though it's likely to be better hidden from the writer than the reader. Here the reaction of release after so many years of taking responsibility is understandable, but not attractive. Richard Russo acknowledges that it was Jean's faith in him that allowed him to believe in himself, but his portrait of her is belittling. About his own achievements, on the other hand, he's rather solemn: "In Tucson I would become a man, a husband, a scholar, a father, and a writer."

His mother had political opinions (she wanted George W Bush indicted for crimes against humanity) but they're only mentioned when an episode of dementia  caused by the excess salt in frozen dinners  deprives her of them. Early in her son's marriage she talked to him as if Barbara wasn't there, but some sort of relationship must have developed between the women over time, or else Barbara was foolish to accept the role of carer, bathing and dressing her when it became necessary.

Early in the marriage they wondered if the day would ever come that they would have their own space back. The description of this crisis finds Russo at his folksiest: "Eventually, that day did come, along with a great many others, and somehow there was still an 'us' for my wife and me to protect and cherish. Indeed, over time our trials would appear to illustrate the old saw that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

When he can't remember whether his mother might not have asked if he minded her tagging along to Arizona in 1967, the tone becomes positively preachy: "That I honestly can't recall something so important seems right, somehow. The mechanism of human destiny  that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint  is surely meant to remain life's central mystery" Plus, it would be harder to characterise her as a burden if she had asked him.

Jean loved books, and gave her son a sense of their value, even if he disparages her taste for wish-fulfilment. This is a potentially touching moment, before it turns into an aria of self-praise: "Though I'd outgrown her books, they had a hand in shaping the kind of writer I'd eventually become  one who, unlike many university-trained writers, didn't consider plot a dirty word, who paid attention to audience and pacing, who had little tolerance for literary pretension." The egotism would be easier to accept in a more accomplished book. Good writing is no guarantee of truthfulness, but it manages its deceptions and self-deceptions resourcefully.

Jean's ashes were scattered on a beach in Maine by Richard Russo and his family  he calls it an "interment", though that can't be the right word when nothing is buried. His daughters spoke, then Russo read what he describes as the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the sun". Still too early, perhaps, to be claiming the title of scholar, if you think a sonnet can have 24 lines, though his mother would have given him the benefit of the doubt.

Richard Russo is best known for his long novels of small-town psychological realism; he has been praised for his nuanced portrayals of working-class angst, and for his books' prominent but deftly wrought strains of social conscience. Russo's Pulitzer-prizewinning fiction never seems explicitly autobiographical, but one senses in it the presence, just below the surface, of a real-life analogue, an upstate New York town and family whose history and character inform his aesthetic.

In this new memoir, Russo has, for the first time, revealed that town and family. "I'm from Gloversville," he writes in the book's first paragraph; he's referring to Gloversville, New York, a faded community in the foothills of the Adirondacks that was once dedicated to the manufacture of gloves. Russo recounts his upbringing there in the context of the town's rise and decline, and his relationship to the manual labour that sustained the people around him.

Gloversville, however, plays only a supporting role in this book, which is dominated by his mother Jean, a mercurial figure whose life remained inextricably entwined with Russo's long into his adulthood, and whose erratic behaviour and unstable mental health have influenced, and at times even defined, Russo's habits of living and sense of himself.

Attractive, energetic and eccentric, Jean Russo "liked men, liked being among them," but settled down with a drunk and a gambler. Russo's father, however, was also observant, and told his son some years after the marriage broke up: "You do know your mother's nuts, right?" Russo didn't, but he does now, and his analysis of her illness makes up the best parts of this book.

Russo's mother, he tells us in a persuasive bit of armchair diagnosis, probably suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. She was plagued by powerful aversions and compulsions; her strong desire to socialise, to love and be loved, was perpetually thwarted by her itinerant ways and her irrational thirst for perfection. Much of the memoir consists of Russo helping his mother pack her things, moving her somewhere, and enduring her inevitable dissatisfaction once she's settled in. No apartment is clean enough, quiet enough or tasteful enough. She refuses to live in Section-8-approved housing (a federal assistance programme) because she doesn't wish to be surrounded by crazy people, and we are invited to speculate that she might really have been afraid of discovering that she was, in fact, one of them.

All of this is vividly described in good-humoured prose, and the pages fairly fly by, propelled by Jean's vexing and energetic self-presentation, even when things get a little repetitive. But I must confess to having mixed feelings about Russo's writing. At its best, it is direct and clear. He is very good at the long, elegant sentence, and his tone here, as in his novels, is nostalgic without collapsing into sentimentality. He is, however, a little too comfortable with cliché; his avuncularity often bottoms out into a kind of corny bonhomie, as when he invites the reader not to observe his town's streets, but to "have a gander" at them; or when he describes his mother as "likeable as all get-out"; or when the ocean surf turns his 10-year-old body "ass-over-teakettle". "In most divorces," Russo writes, "it would be the man who found himself without a roof over his head, and most of these guys wanted to put at least a few miles between themselves and the wives who'd told them to hit the bricks."

Hackneyed writing like this tends to illuminate the narrative with a light too sepia-coloured by which to see clearly. Like Russo's mother examining a potential home, we wish to swipe a finger over the story and find the dirt, but often can't make it out.

Specifically, I wish Russo had spent less time describing his mother's various dwelling spaces, or the act of packing and unpacking her things, or the prosaic details of his travels with her, and more time examining the interplay of their personalities. There was something, he recognises, deeply disturbing about his relationship with his mother, and this dysfunction, in all its dimensions, hopelessly complicated his romantic, familial and professional lives, even as it sustained his gift for writing and the intensity with which he pursued it. One feels that Russo wanted this book to be about his mother, not about him (or, for that matter, about his father, who is given disappointingly short shrift). But his mother is most interesting here in the context of her son's psychology, which we get the sense is a lot more complicated than he is letting on. For example, the book is three-quarters over before we learn that Russo is "obsessive, dogged and rigid" like his mother, or that he harboured extreme youthful obsessions with pinball and cards. ("I sold blood," he admits, "to buy my way into a poker game.")

The patient reader will be excited by this part of the book, especially once Russo connects his mother's obsessiveness to his own desire to create. But the section disintegrates into generic writing advice ("don't let anybody tell you different  novel writing is mostly triage [...] and obstinacy") and then we're on to another episode of packing and moving. Better might have been a more careful examination of Russo's guilt over his justifiable exasperation with his mother, or the strain their relationship exerted on his marriage  two compelling threads Russo picks up, then quickly drops.

That said, the last quarter of the book does give us its most fascinating chapter, wherein Russo's mother shifts, with shocking abruptness, into a temporary dementia characterised by a desperate preoccupation with clocks and time. She resets every clock in her house to different times, demands to know the "real time", wonders why she can't make the clocks run backwards. We see "the ugly blood blister on her right thumb that had resulted from her twisting the stem of that damn clock". And we're given, ultimately, a powerful symbol of the tragedy of Jean's life  her permanent desynchronisation from the lives around her, the impossibility of fixing the mistakes of her past.

I would have preferred more chapters like this  sharply observed, emotionally true and metaphorically rich. But even without them, the book is an absorbing portrait of a town, a family, and an artist  one in which only the artist has reached, against the odds, his potential.

 J Robert Lennon's Familiar is published by Graywolf.