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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
Two stars. Perhaps I would have really liked this book had it been billed as a work of fiction. As a memoir, though, I found it a little hard to believe. It is as if the writer is trying to make his childhood out to be as apalling as possible just to sell a book. I don't doubt that Mr.Burroughs had a dysfunctional background. Who among us didn't to some degree? But to put even those characters who had nothing but good, although perhaps misguided, intentions in such a unflattering light just to sensationalize his story left a bad taste in my mouth.
Laugh out loud This author is in the company of Sedaris and a few other elite writers. This book is literally laugh out loud funny. However, at the same time there is something very sad that the reader almost does not want to be able to identify with. The beauty of Burroughs writing is that we can identify with it, each in our own way. By looking into Burroughs history we can, for a moment, remind ouselves that our own history is not far removed. This is a must read for the discerning reader.A well-performed reading of a disturbing memoir Many critics here complain that Running With Scissors isn't funny enough. I don't think that they realize that the basic subject matter (alcoholism, abandonment, sexual molestation, insanity, etc.) is inherently UN-funny. What Augusten Burroughs is able to do with this material, however, is to present it in as light-hearted a way as possible to make it more accessible to the average reader.
Most of us can hardly imagine the childhood that Augusten Burroughs went through. And we don't have to imagine it. It's laid out for us in this memoir and even read by the author himself for this audiobook version. Having the author read his own material has its drawbacks: clearly he's not an actor, and most of his voices for other characters are pretty weak. But, in the end these small drawbacks are negligible compared to the benefit of hearing the author read his own work. Because of this every sentence is invested with the inflection originally intended.
The story itself is equal parts disturbing, distressing, hilarious, unbelievable, and moving. All the characters in Augusten's life are unbalanced in some way, and the reader (or listener) can clearly see how all the events of his life are affecting and shaping him as a person.
This audiobook is a quick 7 discs and seems over all too soon. Although the graphic sex scenes sometimes are a bit hard to handle, the matter of fact way that Burroughs recounts them helps the audience realize just how the young Augusten is reacting to all his experiences.
I've seen the movie and now listened to the book. They're both equally fascinating in their own way and I recommend both.
