By Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. Crown, 288 pp, $32, hardcover

In 1960, 12-year-old Howard Dully was living in Los Altos, California, with his father, stepmother, brothers, and stepbrothers. He skipped school, daydreamed about girls, fought with his siblings, and stole cigarettes. Howard wasn't a good boy, exactly, but he wasn't a very bad boy either. To some people, however, he was trouble enough. One day, Howard was taken to a hospital where he was given four jolts of electroshock, after which knives were driven up through the thin bones at the backs of his eye sockets to sever various things in his brain. Howard thought he was going to the hospital for tests and Jell-O. What he got was a transorbital, aka "ice pick", lobotomy.

Most people probably want to read about a lobotomy about as much as they'd like to get one. Still, you can't wimp out, because Howard Dully never does. Dully–the eloquent, non-self-pitying narrator of this fascinating, disturbing memoir–is one of the youngest lobotomy recipients on record. His surgery was performed by the inventor of the ice-pick lobotomy, Dr. Walter Freeman, who notably operated on Rosemary Kennedy, the mildly handicapped younger sister of JFK, leaving her institutionalized. Freeman reputedly lobotomized thousands of people, travelling the United States in his "Lobotomobile". The doctor routinely photographed patients mid surgery with the knives sticking from their eye sockets. (Dully includes horrific photographic evidence of his own surgery.) Many patients died; many were rendered zombies. Dully was lucky: his life was merely destroyed.

Why was a perfectly normal child–by the accounts of almost every doctor who examined him–given a lobotomy? Since Dully spent years postsurgery ricocheting between mental institutions, juvenile detention centres, special schools, and halfway houses, he was too busy surviving to stick the question to anyone. "I felt like a freak," he writes. But what emerges from this exquisitely sad book is that after Dully, age five, lost his mother to cancer, he acquired a "stepmother problem". His father Rodney's second wife, Lou, inflicted years of systematic abuse upon young Howard, eventually seeking to get rid of her stepson altogether. "Mr. and Mrs. Dully have apparently decided to have Howard operated on," Freeman's notes chillingly read. "I suggested they not tell Howard anything about it."

Reading Dully's brutally unflinching story, you feel outrage at adults who failed to protect a powerless child and amazement at his ability to forgive. The adult Dully is six-seven and looks like a biker, but when he weeps over the lies found in his lobotomy files, we want to whale on somebody for him.

Link: My Lobotomy at Random House