Running with Scissors: A Memoir

Written by Augusten Burroughs

Narrated by Augusten Burroughs

The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors, now a Major Motion Picture!

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs....

Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Mar 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781593971380

Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs is the author of Running with Scissors, Dry, Magical Thinking: True Stories, Possible Side Effects, A Wolf at the Table and You Better Not Cry. He is also the author of the novel Sellevision, which has been optioned for film. The film version of Running with Scissors, directed by Ryan Murphy and produced by Brad Pitt, was released in October 2006 and starred Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Annette Bening (nominated for a Golden Globe for her role), Alec Baldwin and Evan Rachel Wood. Augusten's writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers around the world including The New York Times and New York Magazine. In 2005 Entertainment Weekly named him one of "The 25 Funniest People in America." He resides in New York City and Western Massachusetts.

Reviews for Running with Scissors

[wuzzlicious · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While sometimes a bit more graphic than I needed, this book was a really fascinating look into how screwed up people get. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a memoir and not a piece of fiction from someone's warped up head.

[literaryw_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting read! The author leaves nothing to the imagination when it came to his sexual activities other then that it made a great and entertaining read.

[bookconcierge · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is entertaining and funny in a horrible sort of way. It's billed as a "memoir" but he must have made some of it up. Please note - I do NOT find anything funny about child abuse, but I think the author is using humor as a shield from the pain - and he does it well. Burroughs is talented and there are moments in this book that are simply hilarious. But this (if actually true) was a horrible upbringing. In light of the James Frey controversy, however, the reader MUST wonder re the veracity of the account.If he is to be believed, Burrough's childhood was horrific - given by his mother (divorced from alcoholic dad) to her psychiatrist - who seems to be insane himself - Burroughs "grows up" in a house with no rules, no school, no protection from other patients (including the pedophile who becomes Burroughs' first "boyfriend"). It's a miracle he survived, let alone turned out half-way normal.

[jaimelesmaths · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gripping and humorous tale of a dysfunctional childhood. The only part I didn't like was the two-page epilogue.

[kjforester · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To label a book such as this 'unrealistic' indicates the reader did not come from a dysfunctional family. And, while I did not experience the degree of unreality that Burroughs related, I did experience it. There were many passages I understood absolutely, for example, "I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future - what will happen next? - I didn't have to feel so much about what was going on in the present." But perhaps the most salient and inadvertently healing quote of the entire book was this one: "I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have."

[dbsovereign · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A bizarre memoir that goes from being grotesque to just plain gross and then breaks down into some sort of sadly freakish situation comedy. All the while the style sits precariously on the edge between madness and real-life absurdity. If only a fraction of what Burroughs recounts is true, he had a truly frighteningly surreal childhood. I assume he had to write about his childhood tinged in humor because otherwise it would just seem bleak and tawdry. That he survived and is apparently thriving is a testament to a heroic fortitude in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

[anaavu · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Running With Scissors was definitely not something I would recommend to sensitive people. The dark horror of the memories of this boy's childhood only brings sadness. There was nothing in this book to uplift one's spirits. The largely fictitious nature of the book also tuned down my interest in this book. I did not find it humorous or poignant as advertised.

[erikasolberg770 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The tone was troubling., I didn't really laugh ...

[howifeelaboutbooks · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book was really twisted. I couldn't believe that someone had grown up with such an awful childhood. Augusten was raised by an alcoholic father who, after leaving the family, refused his son's collect calls, and a mother who had periods of depression and mania while coming to terms with being a lesbian. Augusten, gay himself, became involved with a man over twice his age while he was still an incredibly young teenager. It's well written but there were a few loose ends that weren't wrapped up.

[albinorhino_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was interesting, to say the least. At times, I found myself questioning the authenticity of his "true" stories, but there is still no proof , that I know of, that these stories are fake. Regardless, I still love this book and consider it to be highly entertaining and painfully funny.

[okrysmastree · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was an enjoyable read, definitely, but the controversy around it is one of the many reasons I dislike the "memoir" genre. Burroughs has certainly fictionalized and exaggerated large chunks of the life story he presents in this book, and I hated to read articles later on about the real people he hurt by misrepresenting. So: read this, enjoy it, but take it all with a grain of salt. Memoirs are all about sculpting one's life events into a cohesive story, and in Burroughs case, it seems to have taken more than a little fiction to do so.

[heina_54 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Those who criticize the work due to its portrayal of pedophilia ignore the fact that the work is autobiographical --- pedophilia happens and should not be ignored or glossed over in society. The work is fascinatingly morbid and gritty. The author's detachment only makes for a more compelling narrative, as he is able to paint a complete picture of his young life. It is even more bizarre than the movie and better in some ways.

[purplepanther_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A true story (although some of those involved deny it's completely accurate), quite unbelievable, sad, very sad. I haven't seen the movie (a comedy, apparently), but I'm trying to understand how such a tragic life can be laughed at. Augusten writes with shocking detail, not a comfortable read at all. This book is not for the squeamish or for those offended by explicit descriptions of sexual abuse. Very disturbing. I'm glad I read it and plan to read more of his books, but so far they sit on my bookshelf waiting for me to be brave enough to have a look at the reality of someone else's pain.

[kyuuketsukirui · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was hilarious and engaging, but if you're tempted to watch the film, don't. It just sucked. The book is much better.

[Marlo Cabanillas · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book was so hard to stomach it was hard to read the entire thing. Graphically sexual and just outright twisted throughout the entire book. I love the memoir genre but this one just didn't settle well. I feel like I need a hot shower and some aspirin after this book.

[merrittfamily1990 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Was surprised to find this on my "to-read" shelf considering I read it a couple of years ago! I really loved it, so much so that I shortly thereafter read Dry and You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas. Those were both excellent as well, and I'm looking forward to devour more of his books!

[colie77 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I’m not really sure why people are saying this book is hilarious. Was it the animal abuse? The child rape? The mental abuse? The mental illness? None of those topics are anywhere close to being funny, let alone hilarious.
A part of me thinks this is another “A Million Little Pieces” and his story is overtly exaggerated. At least that is what I chose to believe because this is just too disturbing to be real.

[squeakychu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Augusten Burroughs, remembering his childhood, relates a horrifying picture of his mother basically giving him away to her psychiatrist and his bizarre family. No child should have to endure the psychological torture that this young man underwent. However, through the author’s gift for story-telling, he shares his personal story in a way that presents it with humor and easy readability. Perhaps because of the journaling he did when he was young, he is able to present with great clarity his reactions to those situations that befell him. This book is well worth the read to show that, despite the adversity of his childhood, the author was able to achieve a degree of success as a young man through his chosen career of writing.

[dairyqueen84 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

People have compared this book to David Sedaris's books, but I don't think it's nearly as good. I was deeply disturbed by some of the events in his life, about which he writes lightly. At least in Sedaris's books you felt the pathos of an event even if part of it was funny.

[ranjr-562000 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't really have much to say about this one except it reminded me heavily of my own childhood. At least, the parts about the kids anyway and maybe a few adults. It was interesting and I did enjoy this book even through all of the unpleasantness. I would recommend this book if you're looking for a coming of age biography. A coming of age biography that deals with almost completely absent and mentally ill parents, and a very weird adoptive family.

[terran_9 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Before starting to read this, I had only read reviews calling it a true story of a harrowing childhood that was also maniacally funny. I only read half of it, then did further reading of reviews to discover that the author was sued by his parents and adopted family for lying about events. Okay, he remembers it one way and they remember it another way, he says. Either way, I found nothing funny about it, didn't care for the writing style, and couldn't accept that things actually happened the way he wrote about them.

[theampersand · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What to make of this one? It's one of the best-selling and best-known works in the "midlife memoirs" category, but it's far from the best of them. It might, however, be one of the weirdest non-stories ever committed to paper. And it's a tremendous little guilty pleasure. While you sometimes get the sense that authors in this genre "work through" their material in a sort of semi-therapeutic kind of way, I don't get the sense that any of that is going on here. Burroughs doesn't seem to be "crafting" these stories as much as reeling them off, and why not? His childhood and adolescence seem to have given him material that most memoir writers can only dream of. He's just putting it out there, really. It'd probably be too weird to work as fiction, and I simply can't believe somebody tried to film this thing. What can you say a book whose high point is, very arguably, a sixteen-year-old girl's memorably vivid description of her yeast infection? Where do you even go with that?

And that, really, is the problem with "Running with Scissors". If I were a creative writing type, I'd say that it lacked narrative cohesion, but what it lacks, really, is any sort of cohesion at all. There's not much to knit these I-can't-believe-it moments of record-breaking dysfunction together, but that's less a knock on the author than an intrinsic problem with the material he's dealing with here. It'd be an even-money bet that nobody he spent a significant amount of time around before turning eighteen could've acted normal for forty-eight consecutive hours, if they had made an honest-to-God effort. He and his adopted siblings didn't grow up free-spirited as much as feral. In this book, one inexplicable near-disaster follows another, and each character that gets introduced is more estranged from reality than the last. You could read this one as an indictment of the permissive post-sixties, but nobody here even considered themselves much of a hippie or a bohemian, and one of them went to Yale Medical School. It's easier, honestly, to think of them them a horde of hopeless oddballs. "Running With Scissors" might be called episodic narrative, or a picaresque, but maybe that's just the shape texts take when things keep on happening at a furious pace and nothing ever even starts to make sense. At the end of the novel, the Burroughs tries on an authorial tone to suggest that what he really learned in the filthy, muddled space that his mother's psychiatrist called a home was survival, and, yes, it's a minor miracle that everyone here didn't end up in either Walpole or Danvers. But I also suspect that the author is trying to make sense of things that simply cannot be made sense of. To give him some credit, he seems to sense that he's got some high-octane weirdness here that can more or less speak for itself, and he's smart enough not to take himself too seriously. I'm not sure that he'd hesitate to call the version of himself we see here an immaculately shallow queer cliché. In the book, he comes off as resilient and likable enough, which is perhaps more than you can say for some of the aggressively unsocialized Finch children. The rest is noise. Oh, and bodily fluids and ill-considered construction projects. My own upbringing was, in a couple of ways, different than the ones you see on American sitcoms, but after finishing "Running With Scissors," I got to thinking that I'd never really appreciated how normal a lot of it actually was. I guess this makes this book life-changing, if perhaps not in a way that the author intended.

[sarahlh-41506 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

More of a 3.5 than a 4. More to do with how certain subjects were presented than the writing itself, cause Burroughs is a damn good writer. Very much interested in the film version now.

[beth.clarke · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Just okay. There are so many fantastic memoirs out there, and this one was good, but fell short for me.

[weezer41 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Run away from this book!

[eas7788 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The tone was troubling., I didn't really laugh ...

[rabidgummibear-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was amazing.
It was interesting to read about just how crazy this kid's mother and childhood was. I really couldn't put this book down.

[themerritts1990 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Was surprised to find this on my "to-read" shelf considering I read it a couple of years ago! I really loved it, so much so that I shortly thereafter read Dry and You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas. Those were both excellent as well, and I'm looking forward to devour more of his books!

[kvrfan9 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Augustan Burroughs certainly is justified in writing a memoir, his teenage years being quite unlike those of anyone else I've known. His mother, suffering from mental illness, sends him to live with the family of her psychiatrist (!), most members of which--the psychiatrist included--proving to be as unbalanced as she is.

There is an interesting balance the memoir must maintain. Some of the eccentricities are so "out there," a reader cannot help but laugh. On the other hand, there is a deep affliction of mental illness underlying everything--and some manifestations of it are downright ugly--and there is nothing funny about that at all.

It's because of my ambivalence over this kind of presentation that I award three stars. I was absorbed by the story, but perhaps not as disturbed by it as I feel I should be, because so much of told was in a rather light-hearted way.

[chrisweir-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Was an interesting read. Only the 2nd of Burroughs books that I have read thus far. This focuses mainly on his childhood and early teen years. During this time his mother has a few psychotic breaks and Augusten goes to live with his mother's therapist. Although the family lives in a nice neighborhood there's is the worst house on the block. The family is quirky to put it politely. A Christmas tree is left up until May. Augusten and one of the other kids knock out the kitchen ceiling and then put in a "skylight" using a window from the pantry. That's just a couple of examples of what happens in the house where he grows up without his parents. At times the book is laugh out loud funny and other times my mouth dropped open with shock at what he says is happening. That being said you can't help but wonder how much of the book is actually true and how much is pure fiction or embellished truth.