When Augusten Burroughs was twelve, his mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to her psychiatrist, a man who might have benefited from a touch of therapy himself This is the story of the bizarre years Augusten spent in the doctor's dilapidated Victorian mansion, getting to know the paedophile in-patient who lived in the garden shed, eating Valium tablets like other kids eat sweeties and resorting to the vintage electroshock therapy machine to liven up those quieter moments