[.ca] Running With Scissors: A Memoir (ISBN 0312355645)

From Amazon.co.uk:
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 medicines and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a paedophile 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 glamorises it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a cappella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs' 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' survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe, Amazon.com

Funny book, but not for everyone:
Frankly, I don't know how this was on the bestseller list. I liked it well enough, but the subject matter is pretty "out there," if you know what I mean. And some of the sections are graphic. But overall this was a VERY entertaining book. While the sections on homosexuality and especially those dealing with an underage male may bring some to shut the book's covers, others, dealing with the electroshock therapy machine, Burrough's totally wacked out mother, and the psychiatrist from hell will cause you to laugh out loud. Parts are truly sad, and some sections reek of insanity themselves, but RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, whether you like it or not, is not going to be even remotely like anything else you've read in . . . well, ever. I also enjoyed the book "Katzenjammer" by McCrae for another strange read. If you liked RUNNING, then you'll like "Katz."

what a story teller!:
running with scissors is a great book. the author's writing style is fantastic, so much so that the words just draw you in. little effort is required on your part to get into the story, the words just leap off the page. an example of this would be near the beginning when he was cleaning the pennies, that scene sticks out in my mind for some reason as an example of his writing style. the story over all is great though. i'm sure other people have summarized the book so i won't do that. i'll just say that the characterization was amazingly well done and the odd idiosyncrasies of the family augusten had to live with were hilarious. not too odd so as to seem contrived for the sole purpose of being 'weird', but odd enough to mirror the reality that we're all weird, some more dramatically than others, but this is why its so fun, yes? i smiled while reading this book, smiled out loud! i might even have chuckled here and there. it is definitely higher up on my list of books to recommend to friends.

i hate to be redundant:
but there is 194 "5" star reviews and 54 "4" star reviews, this is just another guy giving it a 5 star review, urging you to read it. it's not a classic by any means, but there's enough dark humor to keep you up at night turning the pages. a very good book.

Running to catch it now:
Is it funny? Humor, like everything else, is subjective. Many will be disturbed by much of it -- if it is taken literally. But I personally believe much of it is either fabricated or exagerated for the sake of "entertainment" or perhaps the truth, as Augusten remembers it, needed a perverted telling. So, taken as fiction (even as exploitative entertainment, a la Jerry Springer and so-called reality TV), I would recommend it to my open-minded friends. I personally enjoyed it, but still felt a bit unsettled by it. I mean, a doctor who reads his own feces as if they were tea leaves? Children who are allowed to function as they please, without boundaries? Pedophilia? Not exactly cheerful stuff, if taken literally. Funny, but only in a morbid way, under the presumption that it's fiction and with the author's gift for satire. Augusten Burroughs makes it all creepily amusing, because the true weight of his feelings may be a bit overwhelming and the truth is always more drab, so he relies heavily on distortion and humor. It's like he needs to constantly make fun and lampoon himself and his past in order to deal with it. In any respect, I must confess I enjoyed this book.

A phony memoir and bad fiction....uggh.:
First the 'authentic' memoir that he had to settle out of court. Then the moaning about being an alcoholic, now he writes a book about his father. A little self-obsessed are we? Anyone who would change their name from Chris Robison to Augesten Xon Burroughs must have a little bit of an ego problem. Was the name Obi-Wan Charlemagne taken already? Get over it already and get over yourself. I mean what's next, a memoir about loosing your hair? So you're a bald white guy, not happy about your family or your upbringing. Then when you got older you drank too much - whoa stop the presses, what a unique life. If every Joe who fit this description wrote a book the world would be empty of paper in a week. A line from his book says it all: "I craved fan letters and expensive watches," - Probably the only truthful line he ever wrote.