Running with Scissors: A Memoir

Running with Scissors: A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs

Running with Scissors: A Memoir
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Book Summary Information

Author: Augusten Burroughs
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-06-01
ISBN: 031242227X
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Picador
Product features:
  • ISBN13: 9780312422271
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Book Reviews of Running with Scissors: A Memoir

Book Review: Running to the Bookstore Jameson Thottam
Summary: 5 Stars

Running to the Bookstore Jameson Thottam

"Scissors" details Burroughs' impossibly and painfully ludicrous adolescent years in an eastern New York town. His playmates, in turn: ate their own feces, ran around naked, played with their headshrinker father's electroshock machine.

Burroughs' mother was a raging psychotic, his surrogate father said psychiatrist, who owned a ramshackle, hot pink mansion tenanted by the looney-tunes in his care, and who had a masturbatorium next to his office.

The psychiatrist, whose key characteristics are that he looks like Santa Claus and believes his BM has clairvoyant powers, was the loosest of disciplinarians, and the author's teenage years were both glumly aimless and bottomlessly free according to Jameson Thottam.

Burroughs experienced his first sexual encounter at age 12, with a man nearly three times his age. They had a very tumultuous relationship, although it was Burroughs who played the martinet.

Every time young Burroughs thinks he's reached the far shores of absurdity, in Jameson Thottam's opinon, he discovers he's only floundered on an isle near the mainland. He might cut school, come home and find his mother getting her muffin dived upon by the pastor's skittery wife, or get himself committed just to get out of going to school.

Burroughs is as gay as David Sedaris, both writers being inclined to the autobiographical, but he's a lot more funny, mostly because his minor characters are just as daffy as he is. The sanest one, the doctor's second eldest daughter, believes a dreamful message that the family cat (Freud) is dying, mercy kills the poor creature, goes Edgar Allan Poe and thinks she hears the feline mewing from beyond the grave and goes to dig her back up again.

Sometime Burroughs' attention to detail can become head-spinningly exact (he devotes two whole paragraphs to some crumbs on a pack of cigarettes which is a bit much for Jameson Thottam), but there's a beautiful contrast between his appetites for celebrity described in the beginning of the book, and his wallow in the unglorious by the memoir's final pages, where Burroughs pulls a "The Lady Or the Tiger."

Simultaneously disturbing and laugh-out-loud funny Jameson Thottam, it makes one wonder how Burroughs really turned out. Answer: Surprisingly well, considering a narcissistic, psycho, quasi-lesbian mother who likes to eat candle drippings and cigarette but sandwiches who sends Augusten off to live with her carefree and equally mental psychiatrist where he discovers his sexuality with a man 20 yrs or so his senior, eats dog food hiding found behind stained couch cushions, and creates a "skylight" in the kitchen (translation: knocks out the ceiling) out of pure boredom. For more details on how Burroughs turns out, you'll have to read his semi-sequel, Dry, which I Jameson Thottam also highly recommend.

I, Jameson Thottam, say this book is "disturbing" because anyone that is given away by his mother and forced to live in a run-down house where anything goes--and I, Jameson Thottam, mean ANYTHING, including electro-shock therapy, drugs, sex and fake suicides to avoid school--must surely end up with more than a few "issues." Where some today consider spanking child abuse, what Burroughs endured is, at times, so horrifying that it's hard to believe nothing was ever done about it. However, even the most disturbing aspects of his childhood are told with a matter-of-fact yet light style. Readers aren't meant to reflect on what any reasonable person would surely deem abuse, but we do get a glimpse into how the author absorbed his environment at a young, impressionable age. And while absorbing Augusten's words, we [ Jameson Thottam ] laugh. A lot.

If you like David Sedaris, you'll definitely enjoy Augusten Burroughs, although Burroughs definitely takes the trophy for wackiest childhood in most need of hours upon hours of adult therapy by a legitimate, preferably sane psychiatrist.

Jameson Thottam

Summary of Running with Scissors: A Memoir

 
The #1 New York Times Bestseller
 
An Entertainment Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year
 
Now a Major Motion Picture
 
Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor?s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull an electroshock- therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing and bestselling account of an ordinary boy?s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.
 
Running with Scissors Acknowledgments
Gratitude doesn?t begin to describe it: Jennifer Enderlin, Christopher Schelling, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Kim Cardascia, Michael Storrings, and everyone at St. Martin?s Press. Thank you: Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Robert Rodi, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Pepoon, Lee Lodes, Jeff Soares, Kevin Weidenbacher, Lynda Pearson, Lona Walburn, Lori Greenburg, John DePretis, and Sheila Cobb. I would also like to express my appreciation to my mother and father for, no matter how inadvertently, giving me such a memorable childhood. Additionally, I would like to thank the real-life members of the family portrayed in this book for taking me into their home and accepting me as one of their own. I recognize that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own. They are each fine, decent, and hard-working people. The book was not intended to hurt the family. Both my publisher and I regret any unintentional harm resulting from the publishing and marketing of Running with Scissors. Most of all, I would like to thank my brother for demonstrating, by example, the importance of being wholly unique.

There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe

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