Runing with Scissors: A Memoir by Mugusten Burroughs

Running with Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs

Copied from Goodreads:
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

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I feel like 3 stars is cutting this book short. I would like to give it a 4 but I don't feel like I 'really' liked it. It was a very well written book, it's just the subject matter (ie Augusten's life) is way too weird for me.

I'm going to wait to write more of a review later, maybe. We have the movie coming from Netflix. Hopefully that will give me a different perspective of the issues. We'll see.

I did like it. I would recommend it to friends, I just can't put my finger on what it is that's holding me back.


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