Augusten Burroughs’ memoir of growing up in Northampton, Running with Scissors, is both horrifying and facinating. It is also very well written, and if you can handle the very high creepy factor, well worth reading. He gets compared to David Sedaris all the time, but I think Augusten Burroughs is more like the love child of Sedaris, Mark Leyner, and Poppy Z. Brite (only without the vampires).

Reading it pregnant is like reading a giant blaze-orange warning label against the idea that children should be encouraged to be free instead of disciplined and made to do things they don’t like, or maybe even hate, like going to school, being forbidden from engaging in spontaneous home improvement projects, and only dating people close to their own age.

It also served as a strange reminder that although we think of "cults" as being big, well-organized institutions like the Moonies, they can exist in smaller personality & power driven enclaves as well.

Burroughs never describes the Finch family as a cult. But given that Dr Finch convinced his patients to engage in completely bizarre behavior that seems so outside of the bounds of normal therapy, including giving him control over their lives or families at an insane degree, it really seems like he had a little cult following.

The most disturbing aspects of the story involved Augusten and his "sister" Natalie both being encouraged to date much older adults while they were in their early teens. Dr Finch actually gave another local man in his 40s custody of his daughter Natalie, in exchange for money, knowing full well that the man intended to have a sexual relationship with this young teenage girl. Eventually, Natalie ran away from the man and returned to the extremely relative safety of her biological family. Augusten wasn’t sold quite so openly, but he too was encouraged to date a man in his 30s while he was 13 years old. In an added bizarre twist, Augusten’s boyfriend had been adopted as an older teen or adult by the same Finch family — so Augusten’s relationship should have been viewed as both utterly age-inappropriate and as incest.

I’m not sure whether or not I’m going to read more of his work. He’s a very good writer, but I don’t know if I can handle the stories.