Derki provides some sparsely poetic narration at the opening and closing, tied to his emotions in returning to a Syria he no longer recognizes. They serve to frame “Of Fathers and Sons” with the feeling that you’re seeing a warped dream of family survival, one in which still-notice...
The bar is dauntingly high for blaming-mom memoirs, but Augusten Burroughs’sRunning With Scissorsdelivers its unkind cuts from a singular vantage. The narrator is an adoring gay boy who loses his Auntie Mame–ish (and bipolar) mother to the seventies, an era in which loony-tunes therapists...