| Running With Scissors: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 818 reviews)
Sales Rank: 748
Category: EBooks
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Studio: St. Martin's Press
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Label: St. Martin's Press
Format: Kindle Book
Language: English (Published)
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B000FA5T1K
Publication Date: September 9, 2002
Release Date: October 26, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Almost everyone can claim a crazy childhood. But did you have a childhood with: An electroshock machine as your favorite toy? Parades through the neighborhood led by your adopted psychiatrist/father? The whole family sleeping on the front lawn for weeks on end? Scotch for breakfast at age 13? A faked suicide attempt to get excused from the sixth grade? A pedophile living in the backyard shed? A psychiatric patient locked in the upstairs bedroom? Christmas trees in May and turkey carcasses under the couch? Lithium, Valium, and Halcyon to eat like candy? Running With Scissors will shock, amaze and disturb you, and will never let you forget the story of an ordinary boy in anything-but-ordinary situation.
Amazon.com Review
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 813 more reviews...
 Liked the Movie Better September 30, 2008
The movie got dozens of poor reviews at Amazon, where readers of the book insisted the book was so much better. I happened to like the movie so I figured the book would be great. It was good, but I liked the movie better.
The book, an autobiographical work that describes Augusten Burroughs' bizarre adolescence, features a mother that is so dysfunctional, Joan Crawford seems like June Cleaver. Mom dumps Augusten at the home of her warped therapist whose family brings to mind a barely saner Addams family. Burroughs describes a series of incidents that colored his life, but the book also contains a definite understory of the boredom that comes from a life with no rules or obligations, including no school.
The movie has the extra intensity of an excellent cast, including Annette Benning, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Chenoweth, Jill Clayburgh, and Gwyneth Paltrow and lacks some of the grossness of the book which makes the movie easier to take. Still it's an interesting story, both funny and grim with a writing style that makes it compelling.
 running with scissors September 29, 2008
the book was a rambling and disconnected series of events. I live near where the story took place and was very disappointed with the entire story. The movie was hysterical,but i don't believe that the author meant to write it in that context.
 What I learned from Running with Scissors September 26, 2008
Augusten Burroughs showed me pain comes in all forms of lies, truth and laughter. It's all connected and somebody always ends up paying a price.
A quirky memoir to be read and re-read September 21, 2008
I first read this memoir when it was published in 2002. Now that other memoirists are rapidly adding their voices to Burroughs' amazing "come clean until it hurts" style of tell-all, I wanted to revisit this modern classic. If you have not read the book, but only seen the movie, don't think you can begin to get a taste of what Burroughs is all about from that film adaptation. Burroughs' laugh-out-loud angst can really only be appreciated on the page, and he must be read to be fully appreciated.
This book, about a boy brought up by a silent, angry father and a mad, narcissistic mother until he is abruptly given away to the mother's insane psychiatrist and his whacked-out family, is a jaw-dropping page-turner. That the boy even grows up to write this memoir is a miracle, in light of the sex, drugs and weirdness he is subjected to over the course of his boyhood.
This is a must-read book, and should be a permanent fixture in any well-stocked home library.
So much better than the movie September 19, 2008
This is a funny, at times laugh-out-loud hilarious book. It's also really interesting and offbeat. You'll find yourself reading one more chapter than you wanted to, and then another and another before you go to bed. It is at times disturbing and appalling, but that's just life. His funniest book, though is clearly Magical Thinking: True Stories
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