The Long Journey Home: A Memoir

About this book

First introduced to the world in her sons now-classic memoirsAugusten Burroughss Running with Scissors and John Elder Robisons Look Me in the EyeMargaret Robison now tells her own haunting and lyrical story. A poet and teacher by profession Robison describes her Southern Gothic childhood her marriage to a handsome brilliant man who became a split-personality alcoholic and abusive husband the challenges she faced raising two children while having psychotic breakdowns of her own and her struggle to regain her sanity. Robison grew up in southern Georgia where the faade of 1950s propriety masked all sorts of demons including alcoholism misogyny repressed homosexuality and suicide. She met her husband John Robison in college and together they moved up north where John embarked upon a successful academic career and Margaret brought up the children and worked on her art and poetry. Yet her husbands alcoholism and her collapse into psychosis and the eventual disintegration of their marriage took a tremendous toll on their family: Her older son John Elder moved out of the house when he was a teenager and her younger son Chris (who later renamed himself Augusten) never completed high school. When Margaret met Dr. Rodolph Turcotte the therapist who was treating her husband she felt understood for the first time and quickly fell under his idiosyncratic and eventually harmful influence. Robison writes movingly and honestly about her mental illness her shortcomings as a parent her difficult marriage her traumatic relationship with Dr. Turcotte and her two now-famous children Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison who have each written bestselling memoirs about their family. She also writes inspiringly about her hard-earned journey to sanity and clarity. An astonishing and enduring story The Long Journey Home is a remarkable and ultimately uplifting account of a complicated afflicted twentieth-century family.