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| Running with Scissors: A Memoir (Unabridged) | 
 enlarge | Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $13.63
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Avg. Customer Rating:  821 reviews
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B00008UVAM
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Amazon.com 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 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
Product Description
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 psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs....
Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 816 more reviews...
 Disturbingly hilarious January 20, 2003
229 out of 259 found this review helpful
I found myself laughing hysterically at this book while simultaneously shaking my head in horror. It's the story of Burrough's life from the age of roughly 13 to 16. Burrough's lived a middle-classed life, but the people around him were gradually losing it. His mother began to have "psychotic breaks" (although it sounds like she may have had bipolar disorder) and hooked up with a bizarre psychiatrist - Dr. Finch. Soon, every aspect of their lives are touched by Dr. Finch and his equally bizarre family. At times, the events are horrifying, such as Burrough's molestation by Dr. Finch's adopted son. Remarkably, Burrough's manages to find the humor even in these situations. People are likely to compare Burrough's to another gay humorist, David Sedaris; however, Burrough's stories are far darker than those of Sedaris, although both of them write great funny stories. This book was a tremendously quick read, and I laughed out loud more than any recent book I've read. Highly recommended on that basis, but some readers are likely to be highly offended by some of the content.
Funny Moments In a Childhood Of Pathos December 24, 2002
118 out of 147 found this review helpful
The only beef I had with what I considered to be well written book was that I spent much of the time reading it utterly horrified at what this guy went through in his childhhod. Falling under the category of truth is stranger than fiction, Augusten Burroughs is lucky to have any sense of humor at all in regards to his past. A near psychotic Mother, a non existant emotionally detached Father, and a Doctor that gives a hideous name to psychiatry, are just a fraction of his distorted reality. I wanted to love it and again only didn't because I found myself so depressed at the circumstances. From reading some other reviews, I guess many people have compared him to David Sedaris, and that seems inevitable given they both had some wacky incidents in their lives. I just never felt that Sedaris' were as potentially dangerous and destructive as the world Burroughs presents.
 The Jerry Springer of literature February 7, 2007
52 out of 63 found this review helpful
This book is to literature what Jerry Springer is to meaningful social commentary. It's poorly written, pointless, vapid, and gratuitous. Defiantly the worst book I have read in a long time. I was sucked in by the hype. Sure, some will say that I just don't "get it," but there are a lot of people out there too dense to see that just because something is bizarre doesn't mean that its profound. This is drivel.
The events described are too bizarre to be believable and, even if they are true, they're not interesting. I suspect that this is a "memoir" in the same sense as "A Million Little Pieces," i.e., a fraud. I recently read an interesting article about how the family in this book is suing the author for defamation. Burroughs is clearly milking the dysfunctional bandwagon for all it's worth.
If this is what passes for "genius" these days (as one reviewer described Burroughs), then our civilization needs to be destroyed...
Am I the only one? October 9, 2004
30 out of 40 found this review helpful
Am I the only one who feels that the material is too sugar-coated, that this book is too excited about how terribly awful it thinks it is? "Not dog food - how crazy!"
Am I the only one who thinks that this book is very poorly written? If a chapter appeared in any of the writing workshops I've participated in, I feel it'd be torn to shreds in hopes of producing a more well-constructed and compelling draft. What is the conflict? Why do I care about this narrator? I mean, I don't. Do you? How did this book become so popular? Why can't I google up a single negative review?
I'm sure AB is a great guy, and has plenty of material for a fascinating novel and/or memoir. I guess he made lots of money, so what am I talking about? Good for him. It is clearly working.
I just wanted to speak up, since I'm one of the few people who feel this way: I did not like this book. It is too busy being cute. It is not vulnerable enough. Writing that details one's bad childhood is not automatically vulnerable or profound, no matter how way-out that childhood seems to the average consumer.
It's a parade of "crazy" people and events, and I could not determine what the story had to offer me aside from descriptions of wacky stuff. Where is the real boy? I felt shut out and turned off. I like dark material, and this book - it stepped around the puddles of dark and instead went right for the cotton candy.
I want my puddles of dark, and I didn't see them here - only the outlines, the places where they happened, abstractions of abstracted pain. My strongest emotional reaction to the material was the disappointment I felt at the end of each chapter. Am I the only one?
Disturbingly honest--and disturbingly funny March 17, 2003
27 out of 31 found this review helpful
When he was a teenager in Massachusetts during the 1970s, Augusten Burroughs kept daily journals recording everything that happened to him. "Running with Scissors" is a result of those journals, but it's unlikely that anyone who suffered experiences like his would need a journal to recall them. Instead, his diaries both gave him the therapeutic outlet he needed while growing up and supplied this book with the rich detail that makes it, at times, so unbelievable.Burrough's mother was a struggling poet who wanted to be like Anne Sexton, and, lacking any talent, she instead suffered Sexton's psychotic episodes. The father, unable to deal with his wife's instability, drank himself out of the relationship. Eventually, Burroughs is abandoned by his family and adopted by his mother's psychiatrist, a certifiable lunatic who dispenses drugs and sex far more diligently than sound advice and who believes discipline is an evil to be avoided at all costs. To complicate an already disastrous situation, other members of this adopted family include several deeply disturbed individuals, including a pedophile who finds a ready victim in the 14-year-old Burroughs. I read this book two months ago, and, while I found it simultaneously appalling and enjoyable, I didn't know what to make of it. Since then, I've read several press reports that address some of the rumors generated by this book's publication. No, none of the people described in this book have sued (or threatened to sue) the author for libel. True, no child with the name "Augusten Burroughs" ever lived anywhere near Northampton--because Burroughs legally changed his name when he was 18. In sum, I've read nothing to indicate that Burroughs is making it all up. Yet there are two criticisms of the book I don't understand. Unfortunately for Burroughs, the back cover includes a single blurb comparing him to David Sedaris, and many readers, unable to think for themselves, contrast the two authors and find Burroughs lacking. Other than being gay and funny (and it's insulting that that is all it takes for people to link the two authors), Burroughs and Sedaris have nothing in common--each has his own writing style and a unique sense of humor. It would be just as pertinent to compare him to Ru Paul. The second criticism is that Burroughs reproduces conversations verbatim from thirty years ago. Putting aside the fact that he was able to consult diaries to refresh his memory, this technique is not uncommon. J. R. Ackerley, Annie Dillard, and Philip Roth--to name just three I've read recently--all use the same conceit in their classic memoirs. Burroughs is not as good as these three writers--his prose is a bit austere, and the book teeters on the edge of John Waters-inspired camp. Nevertheless, criticism of "recreated" dialogue seems gratuitous: any detail in any autobiography can be censured on the same grounds. Burroughs quite successfully recreates for the reader certain episodes of his life--episodes no human being would have been able to forget--and the exact wording of recalled dialogue matters as much as the exact color of the polyester shirt he was wearing at the time. Regardless of its faults (both real and alleged), the book is vivid proof that Burroughs emerged from his past with a profound sense of dignity. In a recent interview, he said of the older man who sexually abused him: "Mostly I still feel an incredible rage that he would do that to a young person, but just as much as I feel that rage I feel sorry for him, because he was someone who was mentally ill and had the most atrocious therapist possible." This quote alone displays his uncanny ability to step back and reflect detachedly on his experiences and to be both empathetic and sympathetic even towards those who deserve his venom. Some readers will be disturbed by Burroughs's ability to laugh (and make us laugh) at what happened to him. Yet the book probably would have unbearable otherwise--and, if it weren't for his sense of humor, it's unlikely the author would be around to tell us his story at all.
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