. Spinning .

This book is a memoir, written by Augusten Burroughs, of a period of time in his youth (age 9 through 17) where a rough home situation of a mother and father constantly yelling at each and giving little attention to their two boys (one of which is the author) goes from bad to worse.

After a divorce, Augusten’s life with his mother is no picnic. She is emotionally unstable, dreaming of being a famous writer, chain-smoking, wanting more than she is mentally able to gain from her existence. She is seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Finch almost every day and Augusten is often left sitting in the waiting room for hours. The doctor makes house calls when Mrs. Burroughs is extremely agitated. Eventually, still unable to cope, she arranges for Augusten to go live with Dr. Finch and his household on a part time basis to enable her to clear her head.

This is more than a dysfunctional family situation over at the Finches. It is a home where the doctor’s patients are often brought in to live with the already large family of daughters. Augusten is shocked at the disarray as he is meticulous in his own person and environment.

There is much for the reader to be shocked about as well. The way the author presents this household is that everyone does as they please and takes responsibility for themselves, which of course, they do not do. The doctor and his long-suffering wife, Agnes, appear to waltz around each other through their days, and Agnes appears to be constantly treated as a maid by all.

There are some points in the narrative where I–and this is perhaps because of my own relatively normal, middle-class, loving-parent, style of upbringing–began to doubt the veracity of the narrator’s expositions of life with the Finches. I checked and sure enough, the family upon which he was basing his story had sued him for slander after the book came out. There was some sort of settlement, Burroughs clinging to his position that very little was hyperbole or sensationalized for publications, and yet it changed the way I read the story.

Memoir is of course based on personal point of view and thus, perspective. Some allowance of course would be given to recollection of events–and I suspected that memory would change events as well, but Burroughs insists that he kept journals at the time and stuck closely to actual events. Time also would influence the story as an adult looking back at a very strange and unsettling childhood.

The problem I had, even taking all this into account, and allowing that humor is often a manner of coping, was that I still did not empathize with any of the characters, even the narrator. I think that while we can often laugh at the strangest and most traumatic events in retrospect (think of Mary Tyler Moore’s “Chuckles the Clown” episode), this wasn’t a series of laughable events, or wasn’t presented as such. Though the timeline is linear, we seem to hop from strange event to strange event, almost like a stand-up comedian telling a string of bad jokes.

If this book had been presented as fiction, maybe some of the scenarios would be approachable as humorous. But there was an underlying disassociation by the author from his story that brought out different emotions in me. He does not seem hurt by all that has happened to him, yet his attempt at humor comes off more as a shocking story at the expense of others. No one seems real so it is harder to accept them as such.

Meanwhile, had it been fiction, I would have been fine with it, even with the voice. After all, having read Octavio Paz’s story “My Life With The Wave,” I never thought of metaphor but accepted that the guy met and loved a wave.

The ending is wrapped up rather quickly and it seems that another book was planned to continue the story as Augusten reaches maturity. There is a quick rundown (as at the end of a true-story TV program) of what happened to each of the characters that doesn’t really satisfy even if I had cared enough about any of them. Of all the cast, Natalie would have my concern, yet she too seemed to cope with the conditions and circumstances of her life by developing a tough attitude and evidently did extremely well scholastically and in her career.

I wasn’t really drawn into the story by Burroughs, nor truly grossed out in the parts that were detailed with oddness or flagrant misconduct and abuse. I don’t think I really was the one holding the story at arm’s length; I believe Burroughs did that for the reader.

The chapter is named, “The Joy of Sex (Preteen Edition).” It presents Augusten’s telling of his first sexual experience which involves his giving oral sex to Neil Bookman, a Finch in his thirties who is gay.

It’s a very graphic and blow by blow (no pun intended) description of the act, as Neil forces Augusten, spreadeagled on the bed, his arms held out and helpless, his head banging the headboard. Yet Burroughs handles this scene, which is almost a rape of young Augusten, in a realistic manner that shows the confusion without fear, the physicality and discomfort, the rawness without full understanding of an adolescent who knows, and yet doesn’t know exactly what’s going on.

I feel like I’ve walked through some door, into some room, and I’ll never be able to leave. I feel like nothing is the same. Just like thaat. Nothing will ever be the same again.

I also feel like I can’t ever tell anybody about this. I can’t tell Natalie, although I really, really want to.

What happened has to be all mine.

I feel crowded by this. Like I need to go home and think about it for a week or maybe the rest of my life. How can I go to school in the morning? It’s already after midnight and I have to be up at seven-thirty to make it there by eight-fifteen.  (pg. 118)

As much as Augusten has been through, we hurt for him that this is what his first sexual encounter is like. It is rough, it is not pleasurable, but it is not frightening except for his worry about being unable to breath. It is visual, he is aware of the sounds his mouth makes, he is aware of Neil’s body and his own head cracking against the headboard. He is also aware of a crack in the ceiling visible partly behind (above) Neil and wonders if it crosses the whole ceiling. He wonders if he could peel the paint off in a sheet. In other words, he is not completely in the moment, whether from conscious choice or from the reality of his discomfort.

It’s very rare that I check reviews on a book as I’m reading it, preferring to establish my own take on it and not be influenced by others. I’ve done it before, usually when I’m reading something that’s been hailed as the greatest thing since Shakespeare and I’m just not getting that from it. I can’t see slogging through the whole book or worse, tossing it aside unfinished, simply because I missed the point and would have enjoyed it had I understood what I was overlooking.

That said, I was at that point with Burrough’s story and doubted the truth of it. Googling it brought up a lawsuit by the family thinly disguised as the Finches protesting the reality as presented by Augusten Burroughs in this book.

Oddly enough, the item I found hard to believe was in fact true, that being Dr. Finch allowing his young daughter to go live with one of his older male patients. I found much about Dr. Finch to be sort of at the edge and in fact, he was subjected to loss of his license to practice for this very thing.

However, according to the family, Burroughs took creative license into the realm of hurtfulness and harm to the family by his accounting of his time spent with them. Some things are embellished, some are called outright lies.

I don’t like being taken for a fool; it’s one of the things I hate the most that people do to each other. That said, and some quick research into the acceptable boundaries of the definition in publishing terms of “memoir,” and I have decided to continue reading the book and take Burrough’s story with a grain of salt. He may be, in my opinion, an “unreliable narrator,” though this is not a term normally used in non-fiction. I’ll grant him his perception–which I’ve already been open-minded about, and label him mean at the worst if he’s colored his facts and characters unflatteringly simply for sensationalism.

Or toss the book if it goes too far.

(Note: The lawsuit was settled thusly: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2007/08/running-with-sc.html

I question little in fiction. I have a hard time, however, accepting as fact in a memoir or non-fiction narrative, even allowing for perception, something like this:

At first I thought it was weird that Natalie had a legal guardian, considering she already had a father. But Dr. Finch believed a person his or her own parents. So at thirteen, Natalie had chosen one of her father’s patients, Terrance Maxwell, who was forty-two and rich. So now she lived with him and attended a private prep school that he paid for. Just like Vickie lived with a pack of hippies that traveled from barn to barn all across America. Every six months or so, Vickie would make a pit stop back home in Northampton. (pg. 86)

Sure, it could be true, but come on? A psychiatrist–even one as whacky as Finch–allowing a 13 year-old to go live with one of his patients, a 42 year-old rich guy?

Not reading this as quickly as I’d expected–now that I’ve semi-gotten over my inability to concentrate on anything longer than flash fiction. I suspect that while it’s an easy, enjoyable read, it’s also presenting two problems for me.

First, the voice is great. Well-crafted and consistent. It’s a touch of sarcasm and very revealing of the first person narrator, Augusten–this is, after all, a memoir. For me, that meant I was going to be reading a true account, regardless of the content. But I find that “memoir” may allow some flexibility rather than that allowed by autobiography. Memoir would indicate perception of the truth rather than truth itself as others may see it. Therefore, it comes to voice to help me discern what is reliable.

The problem of credibility–I’m finding it difficult to accept not the narrator’s peccadilloes nor the aggression and characters of his mother and his father, but rather the actions and character of his mother’s psychiatrist, Dr. Finch. It would seem to me that many of his actions–and here is where the narrator’s story must be most accurate–such as coming over to the family’s house, his “masturbatorium” and his open acknowledgement of it to his patients and the narrator, who at this point is maybe a 12 year-old boy, the hours Finch allows his patient to take up daily, and now, his bringing Augusten and his mother into his own home (more on that) would likely be considered so completely unprofessional as to jeopardize his license to practice.

So while I can accept seeing the story of his life through the eyes of a child who’s grown up (and a bit whacky himself) and relates in a sarcastic nature, I find some of the story incredible. I have found myself reading in a Woody Allen frame of mind in order to accept the recounting of the scenes involving Dr. Finch in particular.

The other problem I was having is that I tend to read closely and the deeper meaning in this story so far escaped me unless I finally take it as “this is why I’m fucked-up today.” His dark humor seems then as a cover for deep hurts and confusion–and one can hardly blame him. I recall when I was reading more mystery and horror novels and then to go into something different I’d still find myself reading for clues, looking for the body.

The writing is very good; the style, the structure, and choice of anecdotes, all are simply detailed and give an excellent image of what is going on. Here, for example, Augusten is with his mother in the filthy kitchen of the doctor’s home, where his sense of order and meticulous personal ways (to the point of obsession) are shocked by the doctor’s children, Natalie and Vickie and the toddler Poo Bear who runs around naked and poops in the living room. Augusten is being told that he must stay at the house a bit longer because his mother desperately needs the doctor’s help.

Her eyes looked different. Wider somehow. Not her own. They scared me. So did the roaches scrambling across the table, over the dishes, up the arm of a spatula.

“Have you been playing with the doctor’s daughters? With Natalie and Vickie?”

“I guess.”

“And have you been having a good time?”

“No, I wanna leave.” The doctor’s house was not at all what I had expected. It was weird and awful and fascinating and confusing and I wanted to go home to the country and play with a tree.  (pg. 53)

Something a bit lighter than the last few books I’ve read, and I chose it also because it’s running just over 300 pages with medium-larger typeface. This was a serious consideration as I’ve spent the last two or three years reading and writing flash fiction, giving myself a serious case of quasi-ADD.

The strongest thing I’ve noticed in the little reading I’ve done in this book so far is the voice. While it is non-fiction (“A Memoir”) there is a reality in the voice of a child describing his mother getting dressed to go out. Augusten Burroughs has caught the tendency of a child’s thinking to go off in different directions mid-stream, the fears of abandonment, of the dark, of all the notice of details that a child will see and form his world out of the vision.

We’re also getting a feel of the family situation, the status, the interaction of the characters in this first chapter.