In the 1990s, the favoured literary vehicle in the US was the troubled-childhood memoir. From the works of Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) to those of Mary Karr (The Liar's Club), true tales of growing up among dysfunctional or dissolute elders found huge readerships and critical acclaim. Several new books point to a new variation on the memoir trend: the troubled-childhood memoir as told from the point of view of the parent.

After a decade of writers describing the ways in which their lives have been made hell by their parents, these latest writers describe the ways in which their lives have been made hell by their children - or, more to the point, they try to figure out how it happened that they became the agents and witnesses of their own children's infernal descent.

Augusta, Gone, by Martha Tod Dudman, is one such book. Dudman, a single mother of two who lives in Maine, gives an alarming account of her daughter Augusta's slide into the anomie and rebellion of teenagerdom. Augusta exhibits relatively harmless symptoms - the insistence on going barefoot even when it's raining, the adoption of Buddhism - but also those that are dramatically endangering: drug-taking, eating disorders, days-long disappearances to God knows where.

Dudman rages at and wrestles with her daughter's disobedience; she tries grounding her, confronting her wayward friends and sending her off to a wilderness programme for out-of-control teens. Similarly, Hold Me Close, Let Me Go, by Adair Lara, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, is an account of her daughter Morgan's perilous path from dyed hair to drug use and pregnancy at 16. Lara sends Morgan off to live with a series of relatives, who can't handle her either.

It doesn't sound like much fun to be a mother to either Morgan or Augusta. "She's so mean," Dudman says to herself at one point, a terrible thing to have to admit of one's own beloved child.

As well as struggling with their daughters, both women struggle with their own guilt. Is all this happening because they got divorced? Because they worked? Because they smoked marijuana and rebelled when they were teenagers, too, and so their daughters are genetically predestined for a life off the rails? The girls are now in their late teens and early 20s, and have ended up more or less alright, which means that both books are essentially redemptive stories of risk and recovery.

But they are also horror stories for baby boomer parents, a generation of parents who - as Susan Cheever, the author of another new memoir, As Good As I Could Be, argues - never expected to have to be adults themselves. Cheever's book, which is excerpted in the current issue of Talk magazine, is less a description of being the parent of a troubled, immature person than it is an account of being a troubled, immature person who happens to be a parent.

Cheever - whose own father, John, was one of the great American chroniclers of the unhappy family, though he did it in fiction - writes of the trauma of realising that her daughter is younger and sexier than she is. Her daughter's adolescence has proved a rite of maternal passage: "I had to let go of how I looked and what people might think of me."

What's astonishing about Cheever's book is that its author should be hung up on the miseries of adolescence - all the fretting about weight and clothes, even at her age. "For four decades now, I have been weighing myself in the morning and letting the numbers on the scale determine my mood," she writes.

What's also astonishing is that Cheever doesn't feel the need to hide her own enduringly adolescent obsessions from her daughter. This is strange, because children like Cheever's daughter and Augusta and Morgan belong to the most protected and benignly policed generation in American history. These are the kids whose every Little League game and school play has been hovered over by their parents; whose self-esteem has been as tenderly nurtured as their growing bodies, and whose parents have tried to be their friends more than their disciplinarians.

Such parental concern, it's clear, can't prevent teenagers from engaging in the kinds of potentially self-destructive behaviour that teenagers typically tend towards. Even if Augusta and Morgan's recklessness and experimentation are extreme, their behaviour is not different in kind from that attempted by many kids their age.

The most remarkable thing about both Augusta and Morgan, rather than their temporary wildness, is that they have mothers who have written about their temporary wildness.

Adair begins her book with an acknowledgement in which she says that Morgan "was not thrilled at any time about the notion of a book about her wild teenage self".

And you might not be thrilled either, if your mother wrote about the time when your aunt complained about your provocative behaviour around the man she was dating, causing you to weep and say: "I can't help it if I have big breasts."

While it's impossible to guess whether these books will have positive or negative effects for Augusta or Morgan or Cheever's daughter, it is surprising, in a way, that the one thing these parents haven't tried to shield their children from is having their intimate lives on bookshelves everywhere.

Yuk! What's in the salad dressing?

Over the past few days, Manhattanites have been grappling with reports of a truly disgusting crime. A man named Marco Arellano was arrested last Friday on suspicion of spraying open salad bars in corner delis - the kind of places where you can grab a quick bite of lettuce leaves or couscous or mashed potato - with a mixture of his own urine and faeces. He's suspected to have done this a dozen times or more.

Lunch suddenly seems much less appealing.

Arellano is, possibly, the most unpopular man in New York right now, though a professor of public health and microbiology who was interviewed by the New York Times did helpfully point out that: "Urine is a sterile fluid, so aside from the aesthetics there should be no health risks from urine." (Faeces, alas, are a different matter.)

Fur will fly at premiere

Disgust is also being enlisted for political purposes in these parts. According to New York magazine, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) is threatening to disrupt a movie premiere at which fur-wearing Vogue editor Anna Wintour is to be the host by distributing a faux fragrance called Anna Wintour Viscera.

This is apparently an acronym for "vixen, impaled, stomach, carcass, entrails, rotting, aroma". But the stomach-turning actions of which Marco Arellano is accused (see above) have ensured that, by comparison, Peta's protest will seem positively docile.

• Rebecca Mead is a staff writer at the New Yorker. An archive of her work can be found at Rebecca Mead. Catherine Bennett is away.