Running with Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs Paperback Book

Details

Rent Running with Scissors: A Memoir

Author: Augusten Burroughs

Format: Mass Market Paperback, Unabridged-CD

Publisher: St Martins Pr

Published: Jun 2003

Genre: Biography & Autobiography - General

Retail Price: $7.99

Pages: 352

Synopsis

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

View descriptions at Amazon.com

Recommended

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
by Frank McCourt

Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood,' writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. 'Worse yet is the miserable...

Princess: A True Story of...
by Jean Sasson

Anyone with the slightest interest in human rights will find this book heartwrenching. It is a well-written personal story that compels the reader to...

I Love Everybody (and...
by Laurie Notaro

Here are more scathingly funny tales from the wild side! Laurie Notaro survived the debauched ride of her twenties and the bumpy road to matrimony....

Night (Oprah's Book Club)
by Elie Wiesel

Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi...

Naked
by David Sedaris

Compared by critics to the work of Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and James Thurber, a hilarious New York Times best-selling collection of essays...

The Pursuit of Happyness
by Chris Gardner

In a candid memoir, a successful entrepreneur traces his journey from growing up with an abusive stepfather, to life on the streets as a homeless man...

A Million Little Pieces
by James Frey

At the age of twenty-three, James Frey woke up on a plane to find his four front teeth had been knocked out. His nose was broken and there was a hole...

Reviews