Running with Scissors

When Augusten Burroughs was 12, his mother handed him over to live with her extravagantly loony psychiatrist, along with the doctor's own wife and children and a number of extremely addled patients, some of them predatory. In this shambles of a household everything was permitted, including Augusten and his foster sister's decision to tear out the kitchen ceiling one night and cut a large hole in the roof to let more light in, which no one then knew how to fix, so no one did. Burrough's account of his deranged adolescence there is clear-eyed and often wildly funny. To hear it not only in his own words, but in his own voice in this fine production is ideal. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine