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| Running With Scissors: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $7.99
You Save: $9.96 (55%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  813 reviews
Sales Rank: 1084
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B000FA5T1K
Publication Date: September 9, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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
Almost everyone can claim a crazy childhood. But did you have a childhood with: An electroshock machine as your favorite toy? Parades through the neighborhood led by your adopted psychiatrist/father? The whole family sleeping on the front lawn for weeks on end? Scotch for breakfast at age 13? A faked suicide attempt to get excused from the sixth grade? A pedophile living in the backyard shed? A psychiatric patient locked in the upstairs bedroom? Christmas trees in May and turkey carcasses under the couch? Lithium, Valium, and Halcyon to eat like candy? Running With Scissors will shock, amaze and disturb you, and will never let you forget the story of an ordinary boy in anything-but-ordinary situation.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 808 more reviews...
 Disturbingly hilarious January 20, 2003
229 out of 263 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
116 out of 149 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
49 out of 60 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...
Not funny, disturbing and upsetting February 4, 2007
33 out of 33 found this review helpful
We have all heard the bad rap some writers have gotten over what constitutes a memoir. Did it really happen? Have you fabricated parts to make it more enticing to the reader? Will Oprah come down hard on you when she finds out you fibbed on the details? While reading "Running With Scissors" I found myself asking these questions over and over again. Could it really be possible there was a man who had his children retrieve his excrement and save it on the family's picnic table, believing they were direct messages from God? The same man who gave his blessing to a "relationship" between his 30 something year old adopted son and 13 year old Augusten, his patient/ward? Could it be possible this man was a psychiatrist and he wasn't arrested for child abuse but eventually just insurance fraud?
If just half of this memoir is true, Augusten Burroughs is lucky to be alive and able to tell his story. Some people who have read this book call it funny or hilarious and I just don't see that. Shocking, disturbing, unbelievable are terms that come to mind but not funny. I suppose it's like laughing at absurdities but I still find the entire story more incredulous than anything. The subject matter of insanity, psychic breaks, pedophilia, and child neglect hardly warrants a chuckle and it chills me to the core that this all might actually have happened. Burroughs tells a frightening story of his turbulent adolescence and he somehow made it out alive but don't make the mistake of thinking you are going to find comedy between these pages. Reading this book was like watching a train wreck, hard to look away but repulsed just the same.
Am I the only one? October 9, 2004
30 out of 41 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?
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