Some family dysfunctions are so pervasive and complex that they beget a panoply of competing and complementary remembrances. So it has been for Augusten Burroughs, whose absorbing memoir, Running with Scissors, was followed by book deals for his brother and mother — as well as by a lawsuit (now settled) by his adoptive family.

Scissors tells of a childhood that is by turns chaotic, migratory and downright ghastly. With his father an emotionally remote, alcoholic professor, and his mother a psychotic confessional poet, Burroughs spent much of his early teens living with his mother's therapist, Dr. Finch, and his family. The squalor of the Finch household is shocking: The floor is strewn with filth, psychiatric medications are passed out like lollipops and school is strictly elective. One of Finch's daughters has been married off to a man many decades her senior, and, at 13, Burroughs himself ends up in an inappropriate relationship with Finch's thirty-something adoptive son.

Burroughs tells the story of this migratory childhood — and of his menagerie of not-quite-family — with elegance and grace, as well as more humor than even decades of therapy would seem capable of providing. "My mother is from Cairo, Georgia," he writes. "This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron." Unfortunately, Burroughs' narration lacks the nuance of his language: His characters, so richly rendered on the page, seem flatter aloud.