Much of Laurie Sandell’s story— addiction, conflicted family loyalty, uncertain love, a damaging father — has been told before. So then why is her “The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir” the best book I’ve read in ages?

Maybe it’s because, in the style of an even-more-personal “Persepolis,” Sandell chose to tell her story in graphic-novel form. Her vibrantly colored drawings are simple, but expressive — in one frame Sandell’s eyes subtly narrow at her con artist father; in another her heart literally beats out of her chest at the prospect of interviewing Penelope Cruz for a magazine — and often funny.

Though more and more memoirists are turning to comics as a trendy new medium for their art, the style of “The Impostor’s Daughter” never once feels forced. It makes perfect sense that Sandell’s story, in which she rails against the outrageous web of lies that her father has constructed, would hide nothing.

The visual nature of the book makes this possible: Sandell lays her life (and her father’s life) bare—sometimes literally, as when depicting her brief stint as an exotic dancer in Japan—allowing for a strikingly honest, intimate self-portrait.

On the other hand, maybe I like “The Impostor’s Daughter” so much because of the story itself. I mean, how many memoirs can boast suspense?

Sandell tells two stories — in recounting the details of her own life and her struggle to unearth and come to terms with her father’s lies, she also slowly uncovers the story of her father. A story which, it should be said, changes dramatically from the one that Sandell accepts as a young child to the one that she discovers later on with help from a private investigator, among other people.

Her father’s presence haunts Sandell’s life.

As she struggles with the ordinary problems of prescription drug abuse and unhealthy relationships, the story is enhanced by the extraordinary mystery that is her father.

Sandell’s shock at uncovering lies both big (identity fraud) and small (embellishments) turns into the reader’s shock. And as Sandell decides that she can’t possibly give up on her search for the truth, no matter what her family says or does, the reader also cannot resist turning the page to find out more.

In the end, though, what makes Sandell’s memoir so enthralling is how very ordinary much of the story is. Very few have a deceitful con artist for a father, but surely everyone has gone through periods of wondering what to do with their lives.

Sandell’s experience interviewing celebrities for a living may be fairly unique, but who hasn’t wrestled with the question of whether one’s family always comes first?

The way that Sandell blends the totally off-the-wall with the universally familiar is what finally raises “The Impostor’s Daughter” above other memoirs. And by the time you’re finished reading it, which I promise will be soon after you start, you’ll be reluctantly thankful for Sandell’s father’s misdeeds — without them, his daughter would never have created this truly wonderful work of art.

Elizabeth Simins was a summer reporter at The Buffalo News.

The Impostor’s Daughter:A True Memoir

By Laurie Sandell Little,

Brown

256 pages, $24.99