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Learning too much about one’s parents can be unpleasant. As adults, we’ve reluctantly accepted that the beings who gave birth to us have independent past lives. However, exploring those past lives, in all their embarrassing detail, is a task few of us have braved. That’s what makes Anna Cypra Oliver’s attempt to reconstruct her father’s life so enjoyable. You get to observe someone else digging up the details—naked photographs, poor decisions, past lovers—and watch as what she finds changes her. All without having to leave the psychological safety of your armchair.

Admittedly, Oliver’s family history offers more skeletons than most. When she was in kindergarten, her 35-year-old father killed himself with a gun after trading in a middle-class lifestyle for the instability of 1969 Taos, N.M., communes and drug running. Her mother, who had divorced her father a year and a half before, became involved with a series of abusive men while converting from Judaism to fundamentalist Christianity. Picked on in school for being a hippie, shaped by her mother’s conservative convictions, Oliver grew to hate the moral laxity of late-’60s culture, enrolled in a Minnesota Bible college and married a fellow Christian at age 19.

The search that culminated in Assembling My Father began in 1993 when Oliver was 24 and starting an MFA program. Her faith in God and her marriage waning, Oliver finally called her father’s old neighbor in Taos to ask for the trunks he left behind. The sparse clues with which Oliver begins her hunt soon lead to unpredictable others, including a tape of her father’s voice. As the leads play out, and Oliver’s father comes into focus, so does her own life.

The story is meticulously put together and covers an astonishingly wide range of experiences. We witness a fundamentalist childhood, complete with “rapture scares,” when Oliver would come home to find her mother missing and believe she had been taken up into heaven. We follow the 1950s cultural fads of three Jewish boys growing up in Queens, N.Y. And we delve into the rupture of two Jewish families whose kids, Oliver’s parents, searched for a more meaningful way of life in the ’60s counterculture but never found it. Normally, the banal details of someone else’s family peculiarities might become boring if not told by, say, David Sedaris. Yet, Oliver’s enterprise compels, perhaps because it’s something few of us dare.