"The most amazing book...hilarious, freaky-deaky, berserk, controlled, transcendent, touching, affectionate, vengeful, all-embracing. It makes you happy that there's such a thing in the world as a string of written words...a golden effervescence of invention and wit that stuns you with its audacity and beauty and powerful love of being alive. "Running with Scissors," as a memoir in the current conventional sense, makes a good run at blowing every other contender out of the water." - Carolyn See, The Washington Post "Memoirs about fathers and sons, says Burroughs, tend to be "advice or sports- towel- snapping things. Where's the book about the dad who didn't sit around with a Red Sox cap on, cheering with you?" That book is here, and it's an infinitely darker work than the author's previous takes on family dysfunction. Before his mother sent him to live with the loony shrink he immortalized in Running with Scissors, Burroughs was a kid at the mercy of a father he believes was a sociopath. "Dead," as little Augusten pronounced his name, showed so little affection for him that the boy made a stuffed dad with the real one's clothes and slept with it, secretly, for years. Through neglect –or worse- "Dead" killed his sons guinea pig and his dog. "Your father is dangerous," Augusten's mom warns: it rings true. Burroughs' famous humor is mostly absent from this account, yet Wolf is not a grim book. How did he survive? Contemplating suicide at 12, he imagines the thrill of leaping from a cliff, then realizes that afterwards "there would be no chance to…pull somebody aside and tell them what it felt like." Writing –luckily for him and us –helped save him." –PEOPLE magazine "The most amazing book...hilarious, freaky-deaky, berserk, controlled, transcendent, touching, affectionate, vengeful, all-embracing. It makes you happy that there's such a thing in the world as a string of written words...a golden effervescence of invention and wit that stuns you with its audacity and beauty and powerful love of being alive. "Running with Scissors," as a memoir in the current conventional sense, makes a good run at blowing every other contender out of the water." - Carolyn See, The Washington Post