Running with Scissors

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 "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 show more 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

4.8

A coworker loaned this to me because she wanted to know if it was just her. It wasn't. Despite the reviews, I did not find this book hysterical. I laughed at a few places, but it was mostly uncomfortable laughter. To me, this book was horrifying. It's a memoir of a dysfunctional family--shocking--but this one is special. Augusten's mom is crazy, his dad won't even return phone calls after the divorce, and so Augusten is sent to live with his mom's shrink. Their house is scary. On Augusten's first day there, the grandson of the shrink takes a dump in the living room, right under the piano. And nobody cleans it up. I'm still wondering how long it took before someone did something about it. No rules in a house apparently means, to this show more family, that literally anything is okay. The wife eats dog food. On purpose. There's a woman afraid of dirt that lives locked in a second-floor room. And Augusten is basically molested by another patient who sometimes shows up. And I'm left wondering how the hell this man became a shrink. It's well written, and rather like a train wreck--I couldn't stop reading. But I'm not planning on picking up any more of his books. show less

this was a series of vignettes that really didn't tie together very well. the writing is pretty good but i'm not sure what the point here is. i'm also not sure how people are talking about this book like it's funny when it's a book about child abuse. it's hard for me to believe that this is memoir because it reads a bit like out of this world fiction, but even if half of what he wrote is true, well, it's pretty bad.

there are moments of writing and insight that show good potential so i'd read him again. i just want something more cohesive and purposeful.

A riveting memoir about growing up with a mentally unstable mother. After his parents' divorce young Augusten finds himself all but abandoned at his mother's psychologist's house. His mother is going through a hard time, and her shrink convinces her to give him legal custody of her child.

The house occupied by Doctor Finch, his family, and a revolving door of patients is a truly surreal environment. Dr. Finch believes children should not be parented after the age of thirteen (and only lightly parented prior to thirteen), so chaos reigns in his house. Animals and people defecate in the house. Roaches roam freely throughout the kitchen that is always piled high with dishes. The staircase is pulling away from the wall. Neither parents bat show more an eye when thirteen year old Augusten begins having sex with a thirty year old man. This man is actually their adopted son and a former patient of Dr. Finch. At one point Finch believes he is receiving messages from God through his own bowel movements. Holy turds are preserved on the backyard picnic table. These are only a few of the countless bizarre events that transpire during Augusten's childhood. Fascinating, an almost completely unbelievable. show less

This book is extremely unsettling. How could anyone be even partially sane after living as Augusten did during his childhood and adolescence? Do people as emotionally bereft and unbalanced as the characters in this book really exist and function in the "normal" world? Surely someone other than the diner waitress would have had the good sense and compassion to intercede in the insanity? Wouldn't the neighbors of the psychiatrist have registered numerous reports with the authorities? Mly heart is undeniably heavy at the thought that anyone, especially a child, lives like this; however, I am a chld advocate in juvenile court and I see these cases frequently and always wonder how children survive the myriad acts of cruelty and neglect from show more those they trust the most. I am stunned that some reviewers found it "humorous." show less

Every person in this book in insane. Augusten himself only has a loose hold on reality at points. I was blown away by this book. I am horrified by the parenting that went on by the Finches, but torn. Was it visionary of Dr. Finch to allow children to make their own decisions and be in charge of their own destinies? But then he practically sells his 13 year old daughter to a man so that he can have a sexual relationship with her. So maybe not so enlightened. I was astounded by Mr. Burroughs life. His mother (crazy!) and father (alcoholic) divorce. Augusten's mother then gives her son to her psychiatrist to raise.

A compelling read. A cast of "characters" that are almost too out there to be real. Amazing.