Shooting the Moon is Louis Nowra’s second memoir, the follow-up to The Twelfth of Never (1999), which presented its author as a survivor of an intensely dysfunctional family. Nowra’s mother killed her father; his grandmother suffered from mental illness. Not surprisingly, The Twelfth of Never is a study of violence, madness, and self-alienation. It is also immensely entertaining, an odd disjunction that we often see in Nowra’s work.