Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Hello everyone! Happy May! I am ecstatic at the fact that the weather is now cooperating with me and all of the things I want to do this Spring. I am not so happy, however, with the fact that school is still not over, and that these last two weeks have been grueling and seemingly perpetual. Because of this, my posts have been few and far in between, and I deeply apologize for this! Despite this, I just read the striking, New York Times bestselling memoir Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs.


In his memoir, Burroughs beautifully describes his turbulent upbringing in the Northeastern United States. The book focuses on his teenage years as he confronts his homosexuality and is abandoned by his mentally unstable, poet mother and neglectful, unsympathetic father to be raised in the chaotic household of his mother's psychiatrist. Not shying away from the disconcerting details of his childhood, the author describes his evolution as a person and the erratic behavior of his parents and volatile guardians. Burroughs, as a child, is forced to deal with his chain-smoking mother who, amidst numerous psychotic breakdowns, becomes sexually involved with the local preacher's wife and a young, equally insane eighteen-year old girl. Simultaneously, Burroughs embarks into a relationship himself, with an emotionally needy thirty-something year old man. Burroughs also wrestles with living under the roof of a deceitful doctor and his family, who find value in the "reading" of their excrements, which they believe to be words from God.


Running with Scissors is most definitely the most soul-baring memoir I have read. Burroughs intricately narrates his tumultuous childhood with a very positive lack of delicacy. He faces the people and events from his fast with a force that will cause the reader to laugh and flinch in the short period of a paragraph. The Los Angeles Times review that described the book as "hilarious and horrifying" is the perfect way to capture the book's aura in two words. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to encounter a new species of memoir- one with grit and the ability to transcend beyond the literary genre's typical boundaries.







"My mother began to crazy. Not in a 'Let's paint the kitchen red!' sort of way. But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, 'I am God' sort of way."






"The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall"






"I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and breed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks accidentally and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive."