The Long Journey Home

March 14, 2011
The mother of Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye) recounts her own troubled life in this unremarkable tell-all. A Georgia native, Robison spent her childhood under the repressive thumb of her mother, with art her only escape. She met her soon-to-be husband, John Robison, when they were both students at the University of Georgia. It was the beginning of a tumultuous 23-year relationship marked by abuse and the birth of their two sons, John Elder and Chris (who later changed his name to Augusten Burroughs). The family moved frequently, following John's teaching positions, until settling permanently in Massachusetts near Amherst in the 1960s, where Margaret painted and wrote poetry. It was here she met Dr. Rodolph Turcotteâthe psychiatrist at the heart of Scissorsâand suffered the first of several psychotic episodes. A stroke more than 20 years earlier left her paralyzed on her left side, though still able to write and speak. Robison recounts the key events in her lifeâfrom the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of John throughout their marriage to her various institutionalizations and her thinly veiled criticism of Burroughs's own memoirsâwith excessive detail that exhausts rather than enlightens the reader.

April 15, 2011

Poet and essayist Robison's (What Matters, 2001, etc.) autobiography of madness and redemption—completing a trilogy of dysfunction of sorts, joining the memoirs of her sons, Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors, 2002) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye, 2007).

The author was raised in rural Georgia in the 1930s amid a family of secrets—a depressed father and a mother defeated by life, and aunts not spoken of who were spirited away to mental institutions. In her search for her artistic voice and confused sexuality, she bent to the will of family and times. Doing what was expected of her, she married John, a young divinity student and later a philosophy professor. John could be loving and kind, but more often—over decades of married life—drunk, violent and psychotic, with frequent and recurrent stays in psychiatric hospitals. In the process, he left deep wounds on his wife and children. Finally, depression and psychosis overtook Robison herself and she too was committed. Yet, as she writes, "madness broke through the thick walls of repression," and she began to write. Still, she had to extricate herself from John and from an ersatz and cult-like psychiatrist, under whose spell she had fallen until he tried to rape her. But Robison persevered, continuing to write and teach and finding love and companionship with a woman. Though a stroke rendered her left side paralyzed, she eventually regained the speech she had lost. She also found her voice, and in old age made the story of her life her own. Robison's story, fairly or not, is really one about women and men—how women can become lost and wounded in the world of men and saved and renewed in the world of women.

A harshly honest memoir that paints a portrait of a woman and a life, both brave and flawed.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2011
With her long overdue memoir, Robison, mother of Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors, 2002) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye, 2007), tosses another piece of the familys Rashomon-like puzzle on the table. Is it any surprise that the three pieces do not fit together into a cohesive whole? Although she confirms at least some of Burroughs assertions about her husband Johns alcoholism and abuse, she insists he only physically abused her. She also claims that the reason she and John assigned guardianship of their 13-year-old son to a quack psychiatrist was to keep him in a better school district. But then she acknowledges knowing that the psychiatrist seldom made the boy go to school and that he was having a homosexual affair with the doctors 33-year-old son. Its too bad that Robisons version of the truth about her family becomes so terribly muddled, due to trauma and psychosis having torn her memory apart, and that her whiny narrative makes it clear that the boys did not inherit their senses of humor from their mother.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)