Running With Scissors - Softcover

Burroughs, Augusten

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843541505 ISBN 13: 9781843541509

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2003

Synopsis

This is the story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of grandeur) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa Claus and a certifiable lunatic into the bargain. Suddenly at the age of 12, Augusten found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian house in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients and a paedophile living in the garden shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules or school. The Christmas tree stayed up until Summer and valium was chomped down like sweets. When things got a bit slow, there was always the ancient electroshock therapy machine under the stairs.

About this title

Review

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 medicines and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a paedophile 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 glamorises it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a cappella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward.

Burroughs' 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' survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe, Amazon.com

Review

'Bawdy, outrageous, often hilarious ... so flippant and so insanely funny (quite literally) that the effect is of a William Burroughs situation comedy.' -- New York Times

'Deftly written, smart and funny.' -- GQ

'The memoir tradition isn’t famed for its belly laughs but ...Running with Scissors, is Dave Peltzer with a whoopee cushion attached.' -- Observer Review

'[Running with Scissors makes] even the most outrageous episode of the ‘Jerry Springer Show’ seem rational by comparison.' -- San Francisco Chronicle

‘A wonderful autobiography ... Beautifully written, generous, twisted – this is an American dream I could warm to.’ -- AL Kennedy

Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1843541505
• ISBN 13: 9781843541509
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304