Running with Scissors
Book, 2002 by Augusten Burroughs
Review & Synopsis from Goodreads/John Moe:
There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir 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.
Movie, 2006 directed by Ryan Murphy
Features: Joseph Cross, Annette Bening (nominated for Golden Globe), Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Evan Rachel Wood, Gwyneth Paltrow and Alec Baldwin
Tagline: Ever had one of those lives?
From Trailer:
Hope: What are you guys doing?
[Augusten is wired with electrodes to his face]
Natalie: Electro-shock therapy.
Hope: Awesome!
Have you read or seen Running with Scissors? If you did (and liked either or both), you might like the continuation of his memoir: Dry.
I thought it was very weird, but interesting...I haven't read Dry.
