The narrator's mother, who has grandiose visions of being the next Anne Sexton, gives him away so she can pursue her own life. In the genre of the growing-up-in-dysfunction memoir, Burroughs's book rises to a new level.

The story they tell is just as disturbing and shocking as Burroughs's story, perhaps even more so. Only the beginning of the shame and humiliation and unwanted exposure and helpless outrage and sense of betrayal that, in roughly 35 hours of interviews with Vanity Fair, members of the real family that Burroughs wrote about say they experienced.

'I have never vomited so much in my life,' she says.Īnd it was only the beginning of what she says she would be forced to grapple with as a result of how Chris Robison, as she had known him before he changed his name to Augusten Xon Burroughs, had portrayed her in Running with Scissors. Sometimes she had to stop to run to the bathroom and vomit. She continued to read that night, occasionally stopping because she simply could not bear to read anymore, she says, only to pick the book up again several minutes later. And, she says, Burroughs had never told her he was writing it, despite his phone calls to her in the late 1990s. She would ultimately discover that her parents, herself, and her four sisters and one brother, renamed the Finches, were actually a major focus of the book. It was then that she got her first inkling that it contained enormous amounts of information about her family. Her curiosity piqued, she went in search of the book on the Internet. Carolyn See, writing in The Washington Post, suggested that his book might well be the best modern memoir ever, and it hit the New York Times best-seller list shortly after it was published. Critics all over the country were hailing Burroughs as a genius. She also says she knew of Burroughs's obsession with fame back in those days, so she assumed that the success of the book, a memoir called Running with Scissors, must have made him especially pleased. It was no secret, to either Theresa or her family, that parts of his childhood had been wrenchingly difficult, that he had been caught in the middle of his parents' volatile marriage and subsequent divorce. They had grown up together as teenagers in western Massachusetts, in the 1970s and 80s, and Burroughs had spent a great deal of time at her family's house. In the summer of 2002, when Theresa Turcotte found out that Augusten Burroughs had written a book that was already a best-seller, she was happy for him.

This Is How by Augusten Burroughs