![]() The nine-year old male narrator watches how his mother dresses to go out for an evening and admires her dress: It is long, black and 100 percent polyester, my favorite fabric because it flows. From the beginning, it expresses a very unusual sensibility. The voice is unsettling, and it catches your attention. The adopted son, an ex-patient, age 33, starts an affair with Augusten, age 13. His 28-year-old daughter serves as receptionist another daughter is sold off at 13 to a 41-year-old killer who beats her. Finch looks just like Santa Claus and has a tatty waiting room and a Masturbatorium where he relieves intimate needs that arise during the course of the day. What does Augusten wish for when his parents separate? That life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal. But what he gets is quite the opposite. After an unpleasant divorce, his father breaks off all contact and his unstable mother ends up signing him over to her psychiatrist, patriarch of a crazy family living in an old wooden house. ![]() ![]() Does the narrator of a memoir need to be likeable? What if hes particularly unsympathetic? What if the life he describes is so very different from your own that you can only shake your head in amazement?Īugusten Burroughs (a pseudonym) has written a memoir about his horrific teenage years in western Massachusetts in the 1970s. ![]()
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