Once, at the height of what he didn't yet realise was his alcoholism, he took 1,452 beer bottles to the tip. Having had no formal education, he managed to find a highly paid advertising job, only to jeopardise his success by drinking. When he was 17, he ran away and, a year later, he changed his name to Augusten Xon Burroughs. Meanwhile, his mother wrote poems and had an affair with the local vicar's wife. Their 34-year-old adopted son, a former patient, raped Burroughs for years. The Finches ate dog food and thought they could divine the future by reading the doctor's turds, which he exhibited on a table in the backyard. Burroughs's parents went into therapy with Finch and, before long, Burroughs's mother left him at the Finch house, 'a place where nothing was shiny at all', on the understanding that it would only be for a couple of days.
He boiled coins on the cooker to make them shiny, and would wrap the dog in tinfoil and take it for walks. He retreated into a world of his own, in which his hair had to be kept compulsively smooth, and he could lip-synch to Barry Manilow. His parents argued so much, he writes, that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the closest thing he had to a home movie. The horrors of his past are extreme, yet he describes them with such throwaway hilarity that they could be trips to the circus.
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