Amazon.co.uk 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 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
Review
Augusten Burroughs's bizarre and painful account of his dysfunctional childhood is guaranteed to shock, fascinate and stretch credulity to the limits. Burroughs's parents divorced when he was 11, in 1965, and a year later his strange and totally ineffectual mother abandoned him into the care of her equally strange psychiatrist, Dr Finch, and his disorderly family. The house is dilapidated, filthy and full of cockroaches, with an absence of any of the love and security a child desperately needs. And this is desperation in this harrowing memoir, at the centre of which is a young boy approaching adolescence in a state of confusion; surrounded by people, yet utterly alone. The most shocking part of the book is the 13-year-old Burroughs's sexual dalliances with Finch's adopted son, 20 years his senior. The sex scenes are revoltingly graphic, and even the least prudish will recoil from these sordid encounters. But Burroughs is unrepentant about the inclusion of this material. 'It had to be in,' he says. 'It's part of the story.' Unsurprisingly, Burroughs subsequently went into denial about the events described in this book. 'I spent my whole 20s blocking it out,' he told New York's Gay City News recently. His first step towards sanity was to seek a therapist - whom he continues to see regularly - the next, it seems, was to pen this horrifying but wryly humorous expose of his turbulent childhood. That Burroughs survived his ordeal at all is incredible; that he manages to wrest some humour out of the whole sorry mess is nothing short of miraculous. You may be offended by some of the things he describes, but you can't help marvel at his extraordinary resilience. This is a shocking tale of immense suffering, but it is also a tale of survival. Outrageous and repugnant it may be, but certainly never dull, and it will imprison you in its grip to the very last page. (Kirkus UK)
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by Augusten Burroughs
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