The Wild, Darkly Funny Memoir That Hollywood Can’t Miss

In an era obsessed with the “unreliable narrator,” Nicole Killian ups the ante by becoming the unreliable heroine of her own life. Her debut, You Can’t Count On Me: A Memoir of Unreliability, is a razor-edged, laugh-through-the-panic chronicle of coming of age amid chaos—equal parts cringe comedy and survival saga.

From the opening pages, Killian invites us to “tighten your seatbelt—or rather, the elastic waistband of your sweatpants”—promising a funhouse-mirror ride through a life she refuses to sand down for anybody. The hook? This is a page-turner with episodic snap: each chapter is a self-contained misadventure that somehow tilts toward a gut-punch of heart.

Killian’s voice is the star. She weaponized wit as both confession and shield, describing how she learned to put on the jester’s cap when things got hard—deflecting with punchlines even as the stakes got very real. 

“We’re all just a little unreliable,” she winks, making the case—without self-pity—that imperfection is the most human truth of all. On the page, that tone lands squarely between Fleabag’s fourth-wall conspiracies and the brash tenderness of Maid: a protagonist who’s messy, magnetic, and impossible not to root for.

Raised between Texas and Arkansas, Killian’s early years read like a series of set pieces. There’s the drawer she slept in as an infant while her parents’ marriage unraveled; the grandmother who became a soft-spined anchor; the carousel of caretakers who felt more like castmates than guardians. There’s slapstick that curdles into real danger—like the day a cat leapt from “catatonic” stillness and claw-latched onto her back, a scene that would be pure sitcom if it didn’t leave marks. 

And then there’s the chilling high-drama of discovering a beloved “uncle” had a twin, one whose name would later appear on an FBI most-wanted list, proof that the show’s villains don’t need to be invented in a writers’ room.

The book’s title isn’t just a punchline. Killian turns unreliability into a thesis about survival. She confesses to a lifelong instinct for flight over fight (she’s the sister who bolts from the vaccination room the minute the Band-Aid goes on) and the uneasy comedy of being the person who can’t be counted on—even as she desperately wants to be better. 

Her “sink or swim” childhood drills that leave a lasting home in one unforgettable pool scene: tossed into the water, she claws her way out; when she tries to “save” her sister, she’s mocked for overreacting and quietly vows to save herself first—an ethos that would follow her into adulthood. Those moments are character gold: crisp beats that crystallize a worldview in seconds.

What distinguishes You Can’t Count On Me from trauma memoirs chasing prestige is the way faith, family, and American kitsch collide in truly cinematic ways. Killian paints summers split between church camps and Waffle House shifts—“the family business,” as she deadpans—where survival meant learning to read the room, the table, and the sermon alike.

In one standout chapter, she visits her Pentecostal grandmother’s church, freezes at a fire-and-brimstone altar call, and “faints” preemptively to avoid the preacher’s hand, only to feel her own mother tap her shoulder and whisper, “Get up! We can all see you peeking.” It’s the funniest, most de-realizing church sequence since The Righteous Gemstones, and it’s lifted straight from life.

The memoir also refuses to tidy up neurodivergence to fit a trope. Killian recalls social literalism, sensory issues, and the isolation of being misread by peers long before she had language for it—culminating in a late autism diagnosis that reframes her past with hard-won clarity. 

The details are frank and unsentimental, letting readers feel the subtext rather than speeches. Even her pop-cultural asides carry weight: the family’s newly devout rules ban Disney at home—until a single VHS tape becomes the only bribe that works for toddler potty training, one of many contradictions that make religion, rules, and real life clash in unexpectedly comic ways.

As adulthood arrives, the stakes sharpen and the resonance deepens. A sexual assault is recounted with restraint and a survivor’s focus, the kind of scene that lets readers feel her calculus in real time. A car accident and its aftermath bring raw, physical stakes—extraction, pain, and a grueling rehab that she narrates with gallows humor.

A left-turn into heart disease culminates in a pacemaker, a medical episode rendered with equal parts surreal detail and humanity. And the personal cost lands with a fully lived-in divorce, honest about grief, logistics, and the strange freedoms that follow. These later-act arcs are where many readers will most see themselves—and why this story resonates.

And then, just when the laughter feels like a safe place to live, the floor drops out. The Fourth of July. A sleeping bassinet. A baby nephew, Bobby, who doesn’t wake up. Killian’s memory of that morning—her first panicked thought about a purpled fist she’d freed from tangled hair hours earlier, the guilt tidal-waving her before anyone says the term SIDS—rips through the book with the force of a siren. 

It’s devastating without being exploitative, and it’s one of several moments where the turbulence of her childhood stops being quirky and becomes quietly heroic: she keeps going, and she keeps telling the truth.

At heart, You Can’t Count On Me has the rare thing readers cling to: a voice you want to follow anywhere. Killian’s opening promise that her story is a “wild ride” isn’t a line; it’s a contract, and she keeps it, weaving spectacle with small mercies, punchlines with pain. 

By leaning into late-diagnosed autism, sexual assault, physical trauma and recovery, heart disease, and divorce, the back half lands with universal force—issues people recognize, lived with a voice they won’t forget.

By the last page, her self-styled “memoir of unreliability” has done something oddly reliable: it makes you feel seen, especially in the moments you’re not proud of. That’s not just good material. That’s the stuff that sticks. You Can’t Count On Me: A Memoir of Unreliability by Nicole Killian is now available on Amazon.