Running with Scissors
2002
- social life and customs
- american novelists
- intellectual life
- american authors
- homes and haunts
- biography
- childhood and youth
- amherst (mass.)
- homes
- manners and customs
The story
"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..."--BOOK JACKET.
What it’s like
Wry, unsentimental first-person prose that turns squalor into deadpan comedy, with sharp sentences, a child's wide-eyed noticing, and a grown narrator's dry hindsight. The mood is manic and grotesque, a cluttered Victorian house full of stale air, mismatched furniture, ashtrays, and strange people, lit in the imagination like a dim, overcrowded stage. Chapters move quickly through episodes, with lurches of dark humor that undercut moments of real dread. The emotional register is bleak but buoyant: a lonely, misfit boy learning to survive by watching everything with a clear eye. Intensity is high. Drug use, bizarre medical cruelty, neglect, and a sexual predator in the household are all present and described plainly, with no graphic gore but real unease, and some scenes of sexual abuse of a child are alluded to frankly. Not gentle. For readers who like unreliable-feeling, darkly funny memoirs of dysfunctional childhoods and can handle disturbing material without needing it softened.
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