Burroughs is a good author, but this book made me sick to my stomach.

This book is about Burroughs childhood. He lives with his crazy mother and alcoholic father until he's ten. Then his mom moves him in with her crazy psychologist. They live in squalor.

I can't even describe to you all the horrible things that go on in this book. A lot of pedophilia. When Burroughs is 13 his 33-year-old stepbrother starts having sex with him. His step-sister, Natalie, gives her first blowjob at age 11 and is sold for cash by her father at age 13 to a 41-year-old man who has legal custody of her as his "daughter" but is really having sex with her and also beating her.

Many other bizarre and horrifying things happen in this book. Besides the rampant pedophilia, there's a lot of severe mental illness and some animal cruelty.

It's 10x worse since it is non-fiction.

My low star rating has nothing to do with Burroughs's writing, but instead with how this book made me feel. Depressed, hopeless, and disgusted with what can happen in this world.

She wasn't "Let's paint the kitchen red" crazy. She was full on head in the oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God crazy..


paraphrased, but you get it..

This memoir was absolutely heartbreaking and shocking! It was like reading fiction.

Augusten is a 12 year old boy who is given by his mother (a delusional poet) to be raised by a psychiatrist, a man who could might have benefited himself from therapy. So Augusten finds himself living in the doctor's house together with his family, an extremely eccentric and weird one. He also befriends a pedophile who lives in the backyard shed.

The book had some funny moments, like the author was trying hard to find something positive and light amidst the craziness that surrounded him. Although he went through some terrifying stuff, he managed to start each day like everything was normal. But I was thrown away by some scenes that I will never forget.

I'm not sure to whom I can recommend this memoir because there are some very disturbing scenes.

n  But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.n

I generally avoid the "memoir" genre entirely; my best friend highly recommended this book to me, so I thought I'd give it a shot. It reads like twisted fiction: A teenage boy's coming of age-grappling-with-his-sexuality-while-everyone-around-him-is-crazy kind of story. (After reading this book and looking at some of these reviews, evidently parts his "memoir" are indeed things Augusten Burroughs made up). If you read for its memoir-like qualities, you probably won't get much out of it unless you are a gay male and are looking for an empathetic voice. If you just ditch the "memoir" tag and read it for its story-telling qualities, "Running With Scissors" is quite terrific. Burroughs really has an apt way of using the English language to put the reader in the midst of the action, and that's no small feat.

I couldn't stand this book. I didn't take to any of the characters, finding them all uninteresting and just plain creepy. I resent people like Augustin Burroughs believing their experience, as mildly off the wall as it may be, actually amounts to something the rest of us should invest our time reading about. Just about any one of us could doctor up our pasts enough to leave some wondering how we emerged from the wreckage as reasonably functioning adults. But we just don't, because these things about us only matter to our family and friends, people whose lives we touch directly, not the masses. And the worst part is it doesn't even end here. We get to read all about how Augustin descends into alcoholism, etc., in his next 'memoir'. Please, spare me. Who is Augustin Burroughs and why do we care?

Burroughs offers a book that is supposedly a memoir. If so, then truth is definitely stranger than fiction. Let’s say I am skeptical. If you thought you had a tough adolescence a look at Burroughs’ tale will put your experience into a little perspective.

He grew up in western Massachusetts to a mother who was probably bi-polar, in what seems like ground zero for inappropriate behavior. She was seeing a peculiar psychiatrist who had a fondness for having patients come to live at his home, a chaotic household that was a combination of You Can’t Take it With You and the Addams Family. Augusten’s mother, unable to cope, essentially gives her son to the shrink. That Augusten was gay adds even more color to this. That he engages in an affair, as a thirteen-year-old, with one of the shrink’s adopted children, a man in his thirties, makes that a dark color indeed.


Augusten Burroughs - from his site

While one may feel some sympathy for the author, who had difficulties in school, who was very much a free spirit, who had a pretty awful family, and had to cope with the ostracism and hostility engendered by his sexual inclination, he does not seem like a person I would want to know. Maybe as an adult he grew out of some of the more destructive behavior depicted here.

One does not have to like the author, or his character in a book, to appreciate the work itself. It is an engaging, fast read and I was drawn in for the duration. While Running With Scissors may be tough to swallow as pure, fact-based memoir, I found that treating it as if it were labeled “a novel” made it all go down a lot easier.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

This book was hilarious and horrifying, at once raucous and deeply disturbing. Burroughs writes like a man who has not entirely made peace with his madhouse childhood but has found a certain kind of solace in his off-center coping mechanisms. His anecdotes are hysterical but mingled with catharses that are simply stated and give the impression of a friendly confidence. This was Burroughs' biggest claim-to-fame book, quite possibly because of the sheer shock value compared with his other novels [which I think should all be best-sellers with giant stamps on them that say "LOL"]. This memoir of the author's young life gives a lot of context to what I had already read about his alcoholism and adulthood. This book is told in the same sort of slice-of-life way - everything is told chronologically and it all links together to tell the bigger story, but each chapter stands alone, too, and has a segmentary title that contributes to that feeling of many individual moments that coalesce into one's whole life.
This memoir was just as hilarious as the other Burroughs that I read, and I found myself both gasping and o_O-ing at the horrid circumstance of his childhood and laughing out loud at his dark humor and plainclothes perception of the madness he grew up mired in. The quote on the first page of the book - Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it. - Jules Renard - is absolutely the mission statement of this triumphant novel. Mission accomplished.

I read this when it first came out in 2003 and was instantly smitten with Augusten Burroughs. He cracks me up! You won't believe that the things he writes about really happened, but allegedly, they did. I read something recently about the shrink's family and their denial about several things in the book. If you were them, wouldn't you try to deny it too, though? Anyway, great read, will have you laughing out loud. This is not your mother's kind of book, you've got to be young and hip and open-minded to appreciate it. Burroughs is so witty, you can't help but think he's cool even though he's got his share of problems.

I read a lot of books I didn't finish this year, but I want to give myself credit for a few of those, because my incomplete 2020 reading resolution feels so very disheartening.

I didn't finish the last two chapters of Running with Scissors, because my audiobook loan expired and then my commute stopped due to my job stopping due to 2020, and then I never renewed. Typical for me, but I'm blaming it on this shit year.

Immensely entertaining. Marketed as memoir but so outlandish that it must have been at others' expense, with a healthy amount of entirely fictional dialogue and anecdotes dolloped onto the "real" narrative for charm's sake -- episodes which now read as somewhat cringey. I couldn't get past the vicarious humiliation I felt for Burroughs' parents and peers, even as I delighted in Burroughs' gossipy narrative voice.

It's interesting to read a memoir that absolutely lampoons (or exploits, depending on your perspective) every single person involved directly or peripherally in Augusten's upbringing, and to see that it became such a popular work in 2002; and then to contrast that with a contemporary woman author's novel (not even pretending to tout itself as memoir) in 2020, such as "Consensual Hex," which has pretty much been cancelled as far as I can tell due to the author using others' lived traumas as fictional material. I haven't read that particular book, myself, but where was that sort of ire when Burroughs, himself a living but lovable wreck, fucked over everyone who ever gave him anything?

I still love Burroughs' writing, but I certainly wouldn't want to be caught up with him IRL. His self-absorption makes for compelling reading at times, and at other times: repellent.

I wish I could give this book more stars - it was fantastic.

a disturbing story with a pretty, happy-ish ending????

i’m already planning to read his other books. I’m really happy that I decided to pick up this book

Leo Tolstoy writes, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”


I’ve always read “happy families” in that quotation as meaning normal families, and assumed by its positioning that normal, happy families were more prevalent. I wonder. Tolstoy’s dichotomy seems simplistic. I’m not sure I know any family that is routinely happy or normal. My parents and brother always ensured I’d win any “crazy family” contest hands down, but even the ostensibly “happy” families I’ve known have had their times of craziness and discontent.

Nevertheless…There is crazy and there is CRAAAZZY.

I’d heard of Running with Scissors for years, but hadn’t read the memoir or watched the movie. I’d begun reading Burroughs’ Dry the other day, but then thought I should start with his first memoir. He’s apparently gained some skill because what struck me first is how poorly Scissors is written. There’s no attempt or knowledge here to use language other than in its most utilitarian sense. Burroughs communicates meaning, but goes no further. I got the impression he used that childhood diary he kept referring to in the book and just added some transition. It has all the poetry of the “and then, and then, and then…” type of narrative your children will sometimes torture you with. …And yes, I know I just ended a sentence with a preposition.

More damningly, though, is Burroughs’ in your face content. In a chapter coyly entitled, “The Joy of Sex (Preteen Edition),” Burroughs’ gives us a long, detailed description of a blow job he – then only 13 years old - gives or is mostly forced to give to his 33 year-old quasi-brother, Neil, who has been adopted by the crazy Finch family, who later adopts Augusten. No matter what the circumstances, this is rape, and yet, this scene, like so many others in the memoir, lacks poignancy because of Burroughs’ relentlessly “take this,” now “take that” mode of narration.

Burroughs apparently views memoir as a form of assault. I’m not surprised to learn he’s been in a lawsuit regarding details of this book, because it feels ramped up. Worse yet, given that I’ve never felt the line between fiction and nonfiction is very clear, and consequently do not get too worked up when I hear that a memoir or biography isn’t always “true,” Burroughs memoir fails to move his audience in any way. Ultimately, I felt like I was reading one crazy, sordid, or otherwise repugnant episode after another, each consciously more sensational than the last. There was no point, and no resolution.

The only point was how much the reader, like Augusten, wants to take in.

I didn't like this book. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for victims of child abuse speaking out against their abusers. I was abused. I know many others who were abused, too. But ... the foster family, the Turcottes, sued Burroughs, and his publisher, St. Martin’s, for the way the book portrayed them. The case was settled out of court, with both sides claiming 'victory', of a sorts. So, who really knows?
"Running With Scissors" lawsuit is settled

Let me just say, I threw this book in the trash. I don't throw away books. I love books. But this one ... nah.

1 Star = Yuck. I'm sorry I wasted my time reading it.