Well, this was an interesting read. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this, just that I heard Burroughs was a funny writer. I think his writing was good and well thought out. He had a fun way of telling stories. This memoir focused on his life from about ages 8-15. Throughout his childhood, he struggled a lot with the adults he should have been able to trust. His mother had mental illness that included what he considered psychotic episodes. His father left the family and stayed out of communication completely. From a young age, Augusten was enthralled with doctors, acting and hair. He had dreams of being a doctor, playing a doctor on a soap opera or being a hair product tycoon. As his mother went deeper into psychotic fits, it was arranged for Augusten to move into the home of her psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, and his family. The family basically lived as slobs, and other mental patients of the father would move in and out of the home as well. Augusten missed more and more school and became more of an accepted slobby member of the Finch family. Early on in life, he realized he was gay, and another man staying in the Finch home helped him develop an adult relationship to solidify his homosexual feelings. It was a little uncomfortable reading graphic details of their relationship, as Augusten was 13 and Neil was 34. Apart from those details, the book had several short stories of mishaps and adventures Augusten had with the Finch family. For example, the family believed that God used many mediums to communicate, including ‘Bible dips’. One story even had the family believing that God was talking to the family through Dr. Finch’s feces. He had his loyal daughter, Hope, scoop the feces out of the toilet with a spatula and display them on the picnic table in the yard. Augusten said the Doctor was so proud of this that he wrote detailed notes of what they meant along with sketches that were included in the monthly newsletter for his patients! Gross!
Toward the end of the book Augusten wrote: “I took an inventory of my life: I was seventeen, I had no formal education, no job training, no money, no furniture, no friends. ‘It could be worse,’ I told myself. ‘I could be going to a prom.'”
I found this to be one of the funnier things he wrote, but there were a lot of funny parts in the book that kept me reading. Ultimately, the book was like a train wreck, it was tough to read a lot of it, but it was hard to put it down.
Rating: ******6/10
Book Thoughts 