“I stood alone in the kitchen, listening to the dim electric buzz of the clock as it secretly counted the seconds, the minutes, the hours. Briefly, I fantasized about slicing my mother’s finger off with the electric knife that was hanging by its cord from the curtain rod.” – Augusten Burroughs.
Hello!
Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it. – Jules Renard. I picked up another book by Augusten Burroughs a while ago; actually when I wrote the first review on the book “Dry”. I read Dry and it blew me away. However, when I started Running with Scissors I constantly compared it to the first one. Reading Burrough’s memoir I thought many times how he gets away with things he writes about. How can he write about these people the way he does. It is sometimes really weird and shocking. Or is it indeed all true? In Running with Scissors he writes about his family – his mother who wants to be a famous poet but struggles and does not get published and his father who cannot deal with his wife’s craziness and drank himself out of the marriage.
At some point, Augusten’s mother starts seeing a shrink, initially to fix her marriage. The psychiatrist puts her on pills and she gets addicted. I thought it was very strange when I read that the mother gives Augusten away for adoption to her psychiatrist who lives in some sort of halfway house with his family “The Finches”. I recently heard of a lawsuit against Burroughs from said family (real name Turcotte family) for invasion of privacy and defamation. Burroughs describes in his book that the Finches say it is okay to have sex between adults and children, the psychiatrist’s wife eating dog food on the couch while watching a movie and many other weird things. Burroughs plays spends time with one of the Finche’s kids and plays ‘doctor games’ upstairs while using an electroshock machine that just happened to not work at the moment they attached it to his head. Or the part when he lives with the Finches at age 14 and a pedophile starts hitting on him and they actually have sex. I asked myself many times if these things he mentioned actually really happened. But that the Turcotte family deny certain things Burroughs wrote about is understandable. I mean, wouldn’t you deny things like that? 🙂
The author has very dry dark humor which is sometimes rather disturbing. It seems that he neither made peace with his childhood nor with his adulthood. While keeping diaries throughout his teenager life in Boston, Burroughs has enough material to write many more memoirs I think. Overall, I did not know what to make out of this book. Did Burroughs make up all his stories? Was it true? You learn that life goes on and that if he made it so far with all he has been through – you can make it too. I actually found an interview on NPR with Burrough’s mother. Listen to it here if you would like.
Whenever you read a book, do you go to the to the end of it to see the picture of the person who wrote it? Or check out the dust jacket? Sometimes in awe, sometimes in shock, sometimes in love? While reading Running with Scissors I actually had to look at Augusten’s picture several times and wondered how this man still looks so put-together and normal after all he had been through.
Click here to purchase “Running with Scissors”. I also share the link to the movie if you are interested. An update that I just found out about on Facebook: Augusten Burroughs wrote a new book indeed. “Lust and Wonders” that will be released in March 2016. Pre-oder it here.
Thank you for reading my blog.
