Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Running with Scissors is a memoir that was recommended to me by some of my students at the start of this school year. I had no idea what the book was about, but was intrigued when I saw that it was made into a movie. I decided to read it while flying to Chicago a few weeks ago. I could not put this book down! It so quirky, weird and awkward, and at times that I found myself asking, "My students have read this?"

It is about the early life of Augusten Burrough, the son of a withdrawn, alcoholic father and a mentally unstable mother. Augusten's guardianship is turned over to his mother's therapist, a wildly insane man with a family full of mental patients (literally). As we read, we learn about Augusten's distaste for school, his loneliness, his realization of being gay, his first romantic relationship, and the friendships he has with his adopted family members.

This book is very entertaining, funny, yet disturbing all at the same time. I highly recommend it to everyone.


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

Check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Running-Scissors-Memoir-Augusten-Burroughs/dp/031242227X/sr=1-1/qid=1167673165/ref=pd_bbs_1/105-4307603-4662060?ie=UTF8&s=books