Turns out Philip Larkin was understating his case when he used a naughty Anglo-Saxon expletive to help him summarise the terrible effect parents have on their children. The parents of Augusten Burroughs (mad, bisexual mother/ violent, alcoholic father) didn’t just f*** him up. They f***ed up his brother, John Elder Robison, too.

Burroughs’s memoir of his childhood, Running with Scissors, was published in 2002. Look Me in the Eye is his elder brother’s account not just of his childhood but how things panned out. So now we have two tragicomic memoirs of life in the same eye-poppingly dysfunctional family. It’s hard to deduce who fared worse. The family only began to break down seriously when Robison was five, so he had several years’ grace before his sherry-soaked father started beating him nightly. Burroughs was born into the chaos – he had a cigarette stubbed out on his forehead as a toddler, and the two boys’ mother was delusional and largely absent. But the physical abuse stopped when Burroughs was five, in part because of a psychologist’s intervention, and also because Robison was getting big enough to defend them both.

Robison, however, had the added difficulty of undiagnosed Asperger’s to cope with. After his first failed attempt to fit in (he pets a girl in the way he has seen adults pet dogs, but she runs away), it looks like this is going to be a rough ride. But it isn’t at all. If this review was a Hollywood trailer, it would use words such as “heart-warming”, “uplifting” and “against all odds”. Robison deals with life with a ruthless Aspergian logic. He becomes a prankster, a rebel and, ultimately, a success.

When his biology teacher bullies him, he orders him a sex doll and a back catalogue of porn. When authority annoys him, he strings a lifelike mannekin high up a pylon, calls 911 and watches from a tree as the local sheriff deals hysterically with the “murder”. When his teachers tell him he will amount to nothing, he leaves, like James Dean, only with a savant-like ability to see sound waves.

Aspergians, as Robison calls them, have incredible powers of concentration. In his late teens, he uses his to visualise the complex structures of sound, and so improve the output of amps and electric guitars. It is an unsual way to come of age. At first, he just hangs around with local bands in Massachusetts, twiddling with broken equipment. But before he is 21 (after a spell in the wilderness with a Vietnam vet and in a Monserrat jail with a band called Fat), he is customising the smoking rocket guitars of Ace Frehley, touring with Kiss at the height of their megastardom.

When he decides he needs more money and stability, he cons his way into the embyonic realm of computer gaming, rises through the ranks and designs the world’s first talking game. When he tires of corporate America, he returns to a simpler life, servicing cars. Within months, his reputation as a man who can fix anything has people shipping Rolls-Royces thousands of miles for his expert attention.

Aspergians often lack tact. They say what they’re thinking, which is, of course, the thing everyone else is thinking but not saying. This condemns Robison to a lonely childhood but, ultimately, he harnesses it. He becomes an exploder of platitudes, a cutter through crap. “In the past, when people criticised me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed,” he writes. “Now I realise that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It’s my way of striking a blow for logic and rationality.”

If something isn’t right, he says so and he changes it, regardless of risk. As a non-risk-taking nine-to-fiver who will never get to strap a rocket to a guitar, I find that quite impressive.

Look me in the eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison
Ebury £16.99 pp304

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy