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mortal coil from the toilet with a spatula and leave it on a picnic table out back to be dried by the sun. It may well have happened but I remain determinedly unconvinced.
    First, call me picky but as an accomplished pastry chef, I don’t think a spatula is up to the task. Perhaps one of those circular slotted spoons Chinese chefs use with their woks would be the lifter of choice. But even a fish slice wouldn’t do the trick, depending of course on the doctor’s output.
    Second, teenage girls, accustomed to squalor as they are, have their limits and that would be one of them.
    Third, the shrink who lived in a huge tumbledown house in a nice neighbourhood, a house that defined ramshackle, even he would drive the neighbours beyond any limit of tolerance if he built a human excrement art-installation on the picnic table in his back garden. It would be viewed, it would be smelled, it would attract flies and vermin.
    Even if the spatula were the perfect kitchen tool, even if the girl, unlike U.S. Army torturers and the British diet hound and toilet inspector “Dr.” Gillian McKeith, had overcome a universal human aversion, no neighbour would tolerate a poo festival out back.
    I say this as a person who watches a neighbour take a specially saved plastic bread bag and a hand spade and monthly collect hundreds of tiny beige balls extruded by her yappy little dog. She saves it for the next garbage collection. I yearn to move to another city or petition City Hall for a new fence-height limit of 16 metres. I, dear Reader, am normal that way.
    Also, I don’t think anyone—and some of the people Augusten was growing up with who did this had enough remnants of sanity that they had jobs outside the home—would eat Kibbles as a snack. It’s lumps of dried dog food that look like … well, there’s a theme here and I’m not running with it.
    Burroughs has rescued himself from a childhood so bad that you wish he had Asperger’s Syndrome, as his brother does, because people with Asperger’s have difficulty making emotional connections with others and are less likely to be hurt by living in a household of mental patients driven mad by a psychiatrist who is a dead ringer for Santa Claus. But there are things that don’t seem possible.
    This creeping doubt about misery memoirs has damaged the work of the great American humorist David Sedaris, who writes truthfully about his eccentric childhood, decades of dealing with nutcases while working in an apple-cannery, as a mover, a housecleaner, a performanceartist and devoted drug user and alcoholic. People say Burroughs resembles Sedaris. But Sedaris is a kind, highly intelligent human being who, while strange, observes the strangeness of others with a keen awareness of his own peculiarities.
    Burroughs is a book in himself, minus his upbringing, and it isn’t amusing. It is tragic. “Not laughing,” as my tiny stepdaughter used to say to me severely when I would tell a joke I thought would appeal to children, usually things that rhymed. (I was trying too hard and that never works with kids. They will not be courted.) All memoirs start to look dodgy to me in this light. When Gerald Durrell wrote
My Family and Other Animals
, the classic autobiography on “that rarest of things, a sunlit childhood” about his youth in Corfu, he made his brother, the late novelist Lawrence Durrell, a figure of idiocy. Indeed, he made everyone a figure of fun. What a collection of fumbling, foolish, well-meaning people.
    And then we read about the suicide of Lawrence’s daughter—he is said to have raped her—and the hopelessly sad, borderline criminal life of his other brother, and his sister’s haphazard scary boardinghouse existence in post-war England, and Durrell’s own pathetic end in a care home, soiling himself and left untended for days by family and friends who admired him but did not really love him. Durrell died like the animals he had put into zoos, surrounded by well-intentioned