Augusten Burroughs

What to make of this one? It's one of the best-selling and best-known works in the "midlife memoirs" category, but it's far from the best of them. It might, however, be one of the weirdest non-stories ever committed to paper. And it's a tremendous little guilty pleasure. While you sometimes get the sense that authors in this genre "work through" their material in a sort of semi-therapeutic kind of way, I don't get the sense that any of that is going on here. Burroughs doesn't seem to be show more "crafting" these stories as much as reeling them off, and why not? His childhood and adolescence seem to have given him material that most memoir writers can only dream of. He's just putting it out there, really. It'd probably be too weird to work as fiction, and I simply can't believe somebody tried to film this thing. What can you say about a book whose high point is, very arguably, a sixteen-year-old girl's memorably vivid description of her yeast infection? Where do you even go with that?

And that, really, is the problem with "Running with Scissors". If I were a creative writing type, I'd say that it lacked narrative cohesion, but what it lacks, really, is any sort of cohesion at all. There's not much to knit these I-can't-believe-it moments of record-breaking dysfunction together, but that's less a knock on the author than an intrinsic problem with the material he's dealing with here. It'd be an even-money bet that nobody he spent a significant amount of time around before turning eighteen could've acted normal for forty-eight consecutive hours, if they had made an honest-to-God effort. He and his adopted siblings didn't grow up free-spirited as much as feral. In this book, one inexplicable near-disaster follows another, and each character that gets introduced is more estranged from reality than the last. You could read this one as an indictment of the permissive post-sixties, but nobody here even considered themselves much of a hippie or a bohemian, and one of them went to Yale Medical School. It's easier, honestly, to think of them them a horde of hopeless oddballs. "Running With Scissors" might be called episodic narrative, or a picaresque, but maybe that's just the shape texts take when things keep on happening at a furious pace and nothing ever even starts to make sense. At the end of the novel, the Burroughs tries on an authorial tone to suggest that what he really learned in the filthy, muddled space that his mother's psychiatrist called a home was survival, and, yes, it's a minor miracle that everyone here didn't end up in either Walpole or Danvers. But I also suspect that the author is trying to make sense of things that simply cannot be made sense of. To give him some credit, he seems to sense that he's got some high-octane weirdness here that can more or less speak for itself, and he's smart enough not to take himself too seriously. I'm not sure that he'd hesitate to call the version of himself we see here an immaculately shallow queer cliché. In the book, he comes off as resilient and likable enough, which is perhaps more than you can say for some of the aggressively unsocialized Finch children. The rest is noise. Oh, and bodily fluids and ill-considered construction projects. My own upbringing was, in a couple of ways, different than the ones you see on American sitcoms, but after finishing "Running With Scissors," I got to thinking that I'd never really appreciated how normal a lot of it actually was. I guess this makes this book life-changing, if perhaps not in a way that the author intended. show less

Just how much of this story is real, or fabricated? Nowadays, after A Million Tiny Pieces (or whatever that book was called) I have a healthy skepticism of autobiographies.

The psychiatrist's family is so messed up that I can't imagine he was truly qualified to help people (turns out he really wasn't, after all) His oldest daughter, who is an adult who seems normal at first, kills a cat by keeping it under a laundry basket and starving it for 4 days. Another daughter knocks a hole in the roof show more of the kitchen to put in a skylight (yes, she is a child, not a licensed contractor) and plaster gets all over the kitchen and Mom and Dad are like, whatevs.

One of their sons actually defecates right there in the living room in front of his siblings, and lets the dog lick his wee-wee. There is so much insanity (and filth) going on in the house, i found myself cringing. Some of the things in here are so over the top that I found it hard to believe. Yes, I know crazy people can be really crazy, but for god's sake, the head of the household is/was a licensed therapist.

The mom is a real piece of work too. She dumps her son off in this filthy house, instead of letting Dad have custody of him. This is a really messed up story of what happens when adults don't behave like proper, responsible adults. show less

Augusten Burroughs' father never loved him. Apparently, not even one little bit. As a child, Augusten's enthusiastic greetings were stalled by his fathers ever-interfering Arms. When young Augusten decides to keep a "scientific" tally of how many times his father says "not now" or "go away" versus how many times he says "come here," the results are so overwhelmingly negative that Augusten is ashamed to say he even tried to measure such a thing. Not only was his father astonishingly unloving, show more he was also, as Augusten realized not too far into his young life, remarkably unlovable. Father had a sadistic streak that made simple things like owning pets or asking to get an ice cream cone exercises in terror. One after the other Burroughs chronicles his most horrific memories of a father who was profoundly disturbed and wonders if he will grow up to be like the monster that struck terror into anyone who could see past the surprisingly normal face he projected to the outside world.

If I were to give in to my first impression, I would have to say that, above all, this book is depressing. Probably the most depressing thing I've read all year, maybe the most depressing thing I've read in a few years. As the book moved into its second hundred pages I was reading it with the trepidation of the easily scared watching a horror movie (Oh nooo, don't leave the guinea pig behind with him! Don't ask to get an ice cream cone! Don't put those cookies in the shopping cart - it can only end badly!). After reading this book, there is surely no doubt in my mind that Burroughs' father was totally unhinged and reprehensible in nearly every way.

So, that's my initial reaction. This book is too depressing to be enjoyed. Why would any happiness seeking human being ever want to read something so utterly dispiriting?

On second look, though, it occurred to me that, whenever I could seperate myself from the unfortunate happenings inherent in this book, Augusten Burroughs is really a great writer. Despite its more depressing properties, I never once thought that I wanted to lay this book down and not finish it. From the very start, this book has a touch of brilliance. Burroughs brings to life his early childhood memories in a perfectly clear and surreal manner in which those memories tend to linger. They're filled with smells, textures, in almost photographic glimpses in which memories from such a young age seem to manifest themselves. Burroughs puts into words the essence of his childish enthusiasm for loving his father and the crushing and shameful disappointment he felt when he realized his advances never seemed to penetrate his father's, at best, indifference toward him. He pinpoints the exact moments when he began to understand, and in some measure accept, the most difficult truths about his father. He captures that tension between desperately wanting to be loved and fiercely hating the same person he can't help hoping will love him unconditionally. He insightfully contemplates what a father should be and whether he did or did not turn out to posess the worst qualities of his own father.

Now that I think about it, it may be because Burroughs' writing is so skillful that this book is so hard to read. We see and feel exactly what Burroughs intends for us to see and feel through his narrative. We come to know the youngster Burroughs was, to understand his deepest desires and to be just as disappointed, angry, and fearful as he once was. A Wolf at the Table is a painful, difficult read, but it is also a sort of cathartic masterwork of a very talented writer. show less

This is my first introduction to Burroughs which feels almost sad to even say.
There was something about his writing that really resonated with me. I am unsure if it was his dry wit, or that so much of his neurosis reminded me of me to some degree.
What I did love about the memoir was that he did not try to paint these relationships as if he was a saint with little blame in the failures that occurred. He was open and honest, and raw in his remembering of clearly these important relationships show more that have defined much of him. It's hard to shine a light on your own failures, and yet, he did it with charm, honesty and a lot of humor.
While clearly, it is not necessary to read his prior memoirs to fully comprehend this one, I do wish that I had, because I feel that this would have felt more like a conclusion or an addition to his life story and would have given it more power for me. As it stands alone, it's a good memoir, but I can't help but wonder if I had read the other two, if I would have felt much more invested.
Regardless, Burroughs is a great writer, and I powered through the memoir with ease and excitement. show less