Running with Scissors: A Memoir

While reading this book I was taken aback by certain events that took place, I think to appreciate this book you have to have the type of personality that is easy going and you definitely have to have a warped sense of humor.
I really enjoyed this book, it was funny and appalling at the same time, it keep my attention the entire time. I can't wait to read, "Dry" and "A Wolf at the Table."

There seems to be a very disturbing trend in memoir-writing where the modus operandi isn't to recount one's life and experiences so much as to fire loaded mental cannons chock-full of wildly exaggerated and fictionlized "events". Thus, the memoir's goal isn't to inform, but to shock. Not to provide insight into one's life, but to be a sickening and horrifying account of a life that resembles a car wreck more than anything else.

Yes, kids. We're not here to dig up painful/repressed memories and place them in the proper context. We just wanna be "edgy" and sell books.

It's no surprise when the factual foundation holding up these memoirs crash like a house of cards when held under a scrutinizing microscope.

First there was James Frey, who told wildly fantastical tales of crack abuse, alcoholism, assaulting cops, fugitive status in three states, incarceration, and ultimately redemption.

Then we found out that James was yet another privileged poser who did no jail time and whose arrest record was a standard frat-boy public drunkenness beef during his college days.

Let's not forget J.T. Leroy, the child prostitute-turned-HIV-positive-transexual whose childhood memories were a White Trash Roadshow full of truck-stop pedophilia and religious freaks. Except Leroy doesn't actually exist.

Or how about Margaret B. Jones, the half-Cherokee gang-banger from South Central, or rather, the affluent Valley Girl who concocted her non-existant "street cred" out of thin air? Or maybe Diablo Cody, the college-educated journalist who got bored of working in a cubicle so she decided to take up stripping for a couple of months?

And on and on.

And now we come to Augusten Burroughs, whose "Running With Scissors" re-counts his childhood days living with a bizarre psychiatrist and his Family of Freaks. It's a book that is so sickening (and its vignettes so widly unbelivable), that you're half-tempted to forgive the sins of the above-mentioned authors.

The first thing you notice in the first several chapters is that Burroughs, at 37 (when he published this book), doesn't seem to have much mature life experience (and he doesn't...he dropped out of 7th grade).

Granted, not everybody who forgoes a formal education at an early age is doomed to a life of immaturity; hell, there are PhD's out there who are just as regressive. But there's definitely a pattern among some grade-school drop-outs who simply never mature past the age they left school. From childhood on they're looking at the world through the same-colored lenses and never bother to adjust because they never learned how.

In Augusten's case, it's that of a petulant, self-obsessed, and condescending 12-year-old. And right away the bombs start dropping. Right away we've got the obsession with neatness and pressed-and-primped clothes. We've got the aloof, pretentious mother right out of a Bunuel film, who gets progressively crazier as the tome continues. She's an "artist" you see, and a paranoid one at that. She fears for her son's life (his father is "homocidal"), so she ships precious Augusten off to live with the crazy psychiatrist.

"Augusten". Another one of the book's unforgivable sins. The author whose legal name was Christopher for the first 35 years of his life is referred to by his pen name throughout the book. Did someone forget to tell Burroughs that you can't retroactively change your name? Muhammed Ali didn't beat Sonny Liston for the Heavyweight Title. Cassisus Clay did. But moot point. Moving on...

What follows is an absolutely, eye-rollingly laughable account of dysfunctional suburban living. To say Burroughs' memories of the "Finches" stretches credibility is to say that cigarettes are a tad harmful to your health. UNDERSTATEMENT!

It remains unclear if Burroughs was going for straight-up satire or was just continuing the rich boy trend of condescending to everything and everyone around him. We expect a bland, white bread psychiatrist's family. What we get instead is White Trash Paradise: A band of freaks right out of John Waters who act out all of Burrogh's twisted fantasies about lower-class life.

There's the gutter-trash sisters too busy eating dog food and playing with electrolysis machines to wash their hair or clothes. There's the 6-year-old brother with a jelly-smeared mouth and some wicked foot odor who not only roams the house naked but defecates in the living room.

Then there's the Howard Hughes-esque Joranne, who displays every obsessive-compulsive and schizophrenic tic Burroughs could find as he was skimming through those mental illness pamphlets.

You get the sense that this is how Burroughs thinks lower-class families really live: in roach-infested squalor where girls leave their dirty underwear in bathroom sinks and where little boys receive oral sex from dogs. Burroughs juxtaposes this with Fern's squeaky-clean family of well-groomed/mannered children.

This is where Burroughs shows his hand as a self-hating rich boy. He laments that he can't imagine Fern's Rockwellian family being able to last 5 minutes in the Finch household. He compares the preppy family to zoo animals, and scoffs disdainfully at the preppy schools he eventually drops out of.

Context? Hell no! Burroughs is still trying to show the reader what an amazingly awesome and crazy childhood he had with that wacky, white-trash Finch family! And like the spoiled little brat he (still) is, he's using tales of graphic sexual abuse and wild, unchecked family eccentricity to score hipster points. Burroughs thinks the edgier he can make this tale, and the more controversial of a back-story he can unleash onto the unsuspecting reading public, the cooler everyone will think he is for having lived to sell the tale, while still feeling bad for him.

But after reading this deliberately trashy memoir, the only thing that deserves sympathy is Burroughs' undeveloped mind. Since the publication of the book, the real family depicted in the book has come forward to shoot down all of Burroughs' ridiculous claims. In interviews, they come across as bland and unexceptional as you would expect a psychatrist's children to be; hardly the motley crue of in-bred freaks Burroughs makes them out to be.

And once you realize that Burroughs pulled most of his memories about the family out of his rear end, it's probably a safe guess that the sexual abuse he suffered as a 13-year-old probably never happened; just another retroactive, narcissistic fantasy in this pitiful and ultimately boring tale of self-myth-making (wait till you read how Burroughs describes his abuser's roommate).

And then you realize what a self-serving hack Burroughs is for writing such an obviously fabricated memoir. In this age of quirk over content, we can easily forgive a feel embellished details. But taking such careless dramatic liberties with a family that took him in as a vulnerable child is simply unforgiveable.

In that light, you can almost forgive Frey, Leroy et al for their fabricated memoirs. After all, you can't libel someone who doesn't exist, so you certainly don't have to worry about a lawsuit. But Burroughs went so far above and beyond simple "creative license" with such a mean-spirited and condescending depiction of his caretakers.

And like any emotionally-stunted memorist trying to score hipister points, street cred, and sympathy all-in-one, Burroughs rode his Rich Boy's Runaway Train all the way to the bank, before the Truthiness Express finally went off the tracks with the real family's lawsuit.

It's obvious that this poor little rich boy spent his entire privileged life doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, carrying around his b.s. sense of entitlement and crying "why me?" whenever anyone dared tell him no (how many kids do you know who were allowed to drop out of GRADE SCHOOL simply because they didn't feel like going?!). Hopefully the fall-out of this lawsuit grounded this petulant brat and took him out of his self-absorbed cave for a few minutes.

But then Burroughs headed back into his well of self-obsessions once again, digging around his obviously uneventful life for more made-up events that he can spin into money-making reality.

But if you manage to make it through this memoir without having repeated urges to throw it into either the Fiction section or the garbage disposal, you'll have a better sense of what a self-loathing cretin this poor little rich boy really is.

You'll also realize that you can't really blame Augusten Burroughs for making up real life as he goes along. He's been doing it his whole life, and found a bunch of unsuspecting suckers to pay him to do it.

I loved this book. I have read it numerous times and I still Laugh my butt off. Way better than the movie, but the movie does hold it's own. I look forward to reading this book for years to come.

A little awkward during some sections, but funny/ witty throughout its entirety. If you like reading about things that seem crazy, this is a MUST read for you.

talk about WEIRD childhood....reading this book left me blank....i don't know if i hate it or love it.....this is weird because i usually feel strongly one way or another....i guess that what makes this book controversial....i am going to watch the movie and see how the director "sees" the book.....i am sure it will be interesting to watch.