Autobiography: The problem about that old adage that everybody has a book in them, is that it should include a qualifying clause reminding us that their ordinariness would doom them to the bargain bin, stickers piling up on the cover in descending order of price. Not Augusten Burroughs. If anecdotes were apportioned at birth, he's the reason why so many of us were left without punchlines, says Shane Hegarty.
Running with Scissors is "Fear and Loathing in the Nuclear Family"; the nuclear family, of course, having long since detonated. It starts with the quick, violent disintegration of his parents' marriage, which, as he points out, makes Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf a kind Burroughs' home movie. It then hits full throttle when his mother enters a psychotic phase she never really pulls out of:
Not crazy in a let's paint the kitchen bright red! sort of way. But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.
His mother entrusts him to the care of her psychiatrist, Dr Finch, a dead ringer for Santa Claus, with a bag full of medication, who gives tours of the "masturbatorium" he keeps at the back of his surgery. He shares his life with his hump-backed wife, Agnes, several children and intermittent lovers. His failure to open a mental institution has only encouraged him to set up shop in his own tumbling, cockroach-infested Victorian home. A patient with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder has been holed-up into in an upstairs bedroom for two years.
Into this household arrives Augusten: 12 years old, gay, with dreams of celebrity and the perfect hair conditioner. On his first visit, Finch's daughters, Hope and Natalie, strap him to their father's electro-shock therapy machine, he watches Finch's infant grandson, Poo Bear, take a dump beneath the grand piano, he begs his mother to take him home. She tells him he's staying a week. He hops from one circle of hell to the next.
Later, involved in a torrid love affair with the wife of a church minister and feeling unable to care for him properly, his mother legally signs him over to Dr Finch. By that point, though, Augusten has settled into his surroundings - a family home run on notions of better living through therapy, of extreme levels of personal responsibility hyped up by extreme levels of medication. When Augusten complains about school, Dr Finch helps him fake suicide so that he can skip six months. It is The Brady Bunch on uppers, downers, and whatever else has recently arrived through the post.
It was difficult to imagine handsome, preppy Daniel [the church minister's son\] sitting in the TV room at the Finches', pointing at the family dog and laughing because little Poo was lying on the floor in a fit of giggles with his pants pulled down and the dog licking his erect penis. It was hard to imagine Daniel seeing this and then shrugging and turning back to the TV. Because he'd gotten used to it.
The problem is that by the time he has gotten used to living with it, only a third of the way into the book, the reader has gotten used to reading about it. Even so, there are still plenty of lines, paragraphs and whole chapters that leave you somewhat concussed by the mania of it all. Augusten's life progresses. There is the accelerated awakening brought about by his sexual relationship with Finch's 33-year-old adopted son, and there are his mother's continual battles with the voices.
Things, however, are interrupted regularly to bring you the latest addition to an anthology of domestic dementia. The time he and Dr Finch's daughter Natalie took a notion to tear down the kitchen ceiling. Or when Dr Finch took to reading the runes through his bowel movements, racking turds along the garden table, so that they could dry in the sun and he could discern a pattern.
Running with Scissors is a chocolate box of flamboyant dysfunction, something to wolf down in a single afternoon. Burroughs has little interest in sentimentality, and none in eliciting your sympathy. Melancholia is wiped away as soon as it appears. His upbringing was horrible, ugly, unsettling, but Burroughs describes it with a breathless glee and through marvellous, vivid chunks of prose. All your stories will suddenly look very, very normal indeed. Be thankful.
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
Running with Scissors. By Augusten Burroughs. Atlantic Press, 304pp. £14.99