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Running with Scissors: A Memoir |  | Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $1.74
as of 9/4/2010 12:24 CDT details
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New (7) Used (28) from $1.74
Seller: secondchanceusedbooks
Rating:  882 reviews
Sales Rank: 909098
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B002BWQ5LI
Publication Date: September 5, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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
The #1 New York Times Bestseller An Entertainment Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year Now a Major Motion Picture 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 unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. At the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor, living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year-round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull, an electroshock therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing, and bestselling account of 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:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 882
 This graphic "memoir" entertains! August 29, 2010
S. Penrose (Small Town, OH)
Right off the bat I have to say I don't believe this is a memoir. To me, this is fiction. Fiction based on real life events, but fiction nonetheless. That being said, it was a funny, irreverent, absurd book. Its too fantastical to believe but that doesn't mean that the story being told wasn't interesting. This family of complete maniacs was hard to not read about. You wanted to see what insanity they would get into next. The sex scenes involving adults and children were graphic and utterly hard to read. Overall, the book is better as fiction because if its true it makes me feel bad for laughing during the book.
 Frayed topsy turvy anecdotes August 23, 2010
Donald Paul Carr (New York, NY)
Pretty brutal homosexual coming of age, where the age is compassionately on the lower bounds and the backdrop is a symphony of chaos. The Finch family would have been deemed unlikely, had I not personally encountered (and intimately engaged with) a similarly alien family as an exchange student.
I was not impressed, although the book was readable.
Heartbreaking August 21, 2010
Jayson Manalili
When I read this book, I was really appalled that people would classify it as a comedy, and that the makers of the film would treat it as such. I thought it was one of the most tragic things I have ever read in my life. The fact that this kid had to deal with not only his crazy parents, but an entirely crazy family is heartbreaking. And it's not just that they're quirky, like everyone seems to make them out to be, but they really are insane. And in the worst possible way. And then he gets totally sexually abused by a thiry year old when he's thirteen, and yet all the reviews I read call it a "relationship." It makes me sick. And he not only had to deal with some really disgusting sexual stuff with that guy, but he walked in on and was a part of some really gross and freaky stuff that everyone else in his life is doing. By the end of it I was hoping all of these people would go to jail or metal institutions, and that all the kids involved in this madness would get some serious psychiatric help and stop listening to their nutso dad. The whole thing just really broke my heart, and it speaks loads about our society that people treat this like a comedy. But I do have to say that it was really well written, and I would classify it as an important book to read to get a view of some of the psycho things going on in this country.
 Running with Scissors: A Memoir August 9, 2010
Nancy A. Anderson (Florida)
It was very difficult for me to believe there was much of any truth in this book even though it stated it was "a memoir".
Funny or disturbing: buyer beware August 8, 2010
P. J. Owen (Atlanta GA USA)
Running with Scissors is the first and most popular of six memoirs by Augusten Burroughs. It garnered so much attention when it came out that they even made a movie out of it. So what's the appeal?
Burroughs is reminiscent of David Sedaris. They both use direct language- often with a high cringe-factor- and acidic wit to bring us intimately and humorously into their childhoods. They can both turn the painful challenges of growing up gay into moments of pure comedy. Some of the scenes in Scissors of Burroughs obsessing over his hair and dreaming of growing up to be a hair care mogul are the funniest and, as it turns out, most innocent scenes in the book.
But there are differences. Scissors, while episodic, reads in a more chronological fashion than Sedaris' collections. It is in a more cohesive format, tying up loose ends, and leaving the reader feeling as if she's read a novel. The second and most critical difference in determining whether or not you'll like Scissors is that Burroughs' childhood makes Sedaris' seem like a picnic in comparison.
The biggest player in that turbulent childhood was Burroughs' mother, a failed writer and occasional psychotic. She never learned to deal with life and after a bitter and violent end to her marriage, turns herself and her son over to a psychiatrist with very unorthodox methods, to say the least. This Dr. Finch, who oozes creepy from the moment he walks on the stage, invites Burroughs and his mother to effectively join their family. As a result, Burroughs spends the majority of his teen years shuttling between the two homes.
At the Finch's, Burroughs finds the household run in the loose and bizarre manner one would expect from a radical psychiatrist who lives his unconventional theories. Six year-old children defecate under pianos, crazy patients sleep in upstairs rooms, people walk around the house naked, feces are consulted to read the future. The children are left to their own devices out of the Dr. Finchs' mis-guided belief that children become adults at thirteen. And the results are predictable: Burroughs quits school, turns to drugs, is taken advantage of. It's not long before our suspicions are confirmed and we learn the Dr Finch is not just bizarre, but much worse. Yet his mother's home isn't much better, as Burroughs never knows when she will flip out, never knows how crazy she will behave or even if she will become violent with him.
Though we know no good can come of any of this (at least not until years later when the victim of this abuse can write a best-selling memoir about it) all of it still makes for great reading. There's endless drama and tension. And Burroughs is funny. He wants you to laugh at the horrors of his childhood. And you might laugh throughout, even at scenes that you can't believe you're laughing at because what is happening is so sad. That's the edge that makes Burroughs so good. Scissors is great because it is a polarizing book: you may find yourself laughing or crying depending on your perspective of life. To enjoy this book, you need to be able to read about child abuse turned into comedy by the victim. We know that child abuse is not funny, but what about when the victim themselves make light of it? If you can join this victim in his laughter, if you can read scenes of child rape and abuse turned into jokes in what I can only believe is a cathartic experience for the victim and author, then you'll probably love this book. If you cannot, pass on this one. You will not be able to stomach it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 882
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