Running with Scissors: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  814 reviews
Sales Rank: 4445
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312938853
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312938857
ASIN: 0312938853
Publication Date: August 29, 2006
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Condition: Standard used condition.
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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
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. So 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: Read 809 more reviews...
 Certainly Isn't Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood August 29, 2008
If even just half of the instances in Mr. Burroughs' book are true, none of these characters should ever raise children until they get their acts together. The story is funny, very quirky, extremely disturbing and labeling these people as excessively dysfunctional is putting it waaaaaaaay too mildly. The book will not give you any warm fuzzies, that's for sure. If it does, you need psychiatric help. Mr. Burroughs is a wonderful writer with excellent comic timing. But please be warned, some of this stuff is brutal and troubling to the point of almost making me ill. Talking with someone who works with such families, these kind of idiosyncratic qualities are not that uncommon. Well worth reading, but be prepared.
 Run from this book...or take your scissors to it. August 18, 2008
The reviews on the cover of this book were wildly misleading; I found no pleasure or humor in reading this tragic and twisted memoir. I actually felt sickenly violated after being exposed to the author's graphic depiction of his first and abusive sexual experience. I actually wish the toxic memory of this book could be erased from my mind. As a result, I will NOT donate this book to Goodwill to pollute anyone else's mind...it will go straight to the TRASH where it belongs.
 This book is too easy to read August 15, 2008
If it was not for the overtly sexual and disturbing subject manner i would have thought this book was written by a ten year old boy. I got this book because it was at the dollar bookstore and i wanted a change a pace from the English Literature i have been reading lately.
I also got sick of all the pop culture references thought out the book. I also don't believe a lot of what in this memoir is true. The most appalling thing about this story is that all of the characters in this book felt it was ok for him to be sexually active when he was 13 and to have a 33 year old pedophile as a boyfriend. I gave this three stars because it was readable. Another thing that bugs me about this book is the way it is published. The words on the pages are too big and there is way too many spaces between the lines. This makes the book like 300 hundred pages. But if it was mass market paperback it would only be like 150 pages. With the enviorment in a state of decline i felt it should have used less paper. The only reason they made the book this way is too make it seem like it is a bigger book then it really is. If i paid the retail price for it i would have be livid.
Entertaining August 8, 2008
While skimming through the reviews for Running with Scissors, I noticed that readers either loved it or hated it. I think that it depends on how you look at the book. If you are expecting to be entertained by the bizarre stories that Burroughs tells throughout his memoir, I think you will love it. If you are expecting a great piece of literary work, not so much. Burroughs is comparable to David Sedaris, and although I have not read any of Sedaris's books, although I do own a few, I know that they are lightly written, you don't have to think while reading them books. I loved the book, I thought it was bizarre and hilarious, and I think that is all the reader is supposed to get out of it. So my opinion is that you will either love it or hate it depending on what your expectations of the book are.
Pure Trash August 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Augusten Burroughs should be ashamed of himself for writing such trash. It was neither funny...I can't beleive anyone would laugh at it, nor entertaining, nor horrible, because I don't for one minute beleive it was a true story. I read the first half and then threw it in the trachcan.
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