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RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

by Augusten Burroughs ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

An unusual upbringing, reconstituted into a very usual memoir.

Autobiography of adolescent trauma depicting the author’s quest for survival in an unorthodox family alongside his quest for fabulous hair.

Copywriter turned novelist Burroughs ( Sellevision , 2000) captures in his memoir a particular cultural moment in the late 1970s and early ’80s when the baby boomers’ flaccid if-it-feels-good-do-it ethos soured. “My parents loathed each other and the life they had built together,” he writes. The estrangement of his increasingly manic-depressive poet mother and cold, alcoholic father flung young Burroughs into the strange Northampton, Massachusetts, household of family psychiatrist Dr. Finch, a jolly and permissive yet ominous figure who advocated intense therapy and nonjudgmental fathering. At his mother’s insistence, Burroughs spent much of his adolescence living among the Finches. The fussy, hairdressing-obsessed boy was unnerved by their squalid household but became close with irascible daughters Hope and Natalie, participating in their substance abuse and delinquency, helping them wreck the Finches’ dilapidated Victorian house. The doctor’s pseudo-parenting encouraged the boy’s sexual relationship with creepy, manipulative, much older Neil Bookman, Finch’s “adopted son.” When the doctor coached Burroughs to stage a suicide attempt in order to get out of going to school, our hero began to wonder whether life with the Finches would equip him, or Hope, or Natalie with mainstream survival skills—eventually, surprisingly enough, it did. Burroughs strongly delineates the tangled, perverse bonds among these high-watt eccentrics and his childhood self, aspiring to a grotesque comic merger of John Waters and David Sedaris. However, his under-edited prose is frequently uninspired and rambling, relying on consumer-culture references (from Clairol, Pat Benatar, Brooke Shields, Captain and Tennille, Sea Monkeys, the Brady Bunch, to Magic Eight Balls, etc., etc.) and repetitive sequences of abrasive dialogue (“Stop antagonizing me. . . . Just stop transferring all this anger onto me”). Presumably he garnered these details from his oft-mentioned journal, but they fail to deepen the characters.

Pub Date: July 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-312-28370-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

Notes on the first 150 years in america.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates ( The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood , 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE

More by Ta-Nehisi Coates

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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Reviews of Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Running with Scissors

by Augusten Burroughs

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• Biography & Memoir
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Humor & Satire

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Book Summary

The true story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull an electroshock-therapy machine could provide entertainment.

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 unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull an electroshock- therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances. See also "Settlement reached in Running with Scissors suit" news story, 8/31/2007.

Excerpt Running with Scissors

My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Nate, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgun-shaped blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of her cheek. "Damn it," she says, "something isn't right." Yesterday she went to the fancy Chopping Block salon in Amherst with its bubble skylights and ficus trees in chrome planters. Sebastian gave her a shag. "That hateful Jane Fonda," she says, fluffing her dark brown hair at the crown. "She makes it look so easy." She pinches her sideburns into points that accentuate her cheekbones. People have always said she looks like a young Lauren Bacall, especially in the eyes. I can't stop staring at her feet, which she has slipped into treacherously tall red patent-leather pumps. ...

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Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Running with scissors by augusten burroughs - book review.

"Running With Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs Book Review

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A blog about book reviews, knitting, and crafts., “running with scissors”: a review of augusten burroughs’ memoir.

Running with Scissors is one of those books that I have wanted to read for such a long time, but somehow never managed to find the book at the right moment. When I found a second-hand copy of the memoir at a second-hand book fair in Geneva, I decided to pick it up. The book travelled with me to Catania, Sicily this summer and I loved reading whilst relaxing on the beach.

Augusten Burroughs’ childhood makes most people grateful for their boring upbringings. His family life was volatile and far too much to process as a child/teenager. Burroughs tells the story of his childhood with the same type of innocence that he probably would have experienced his surroundings. His matter-of-fact way of writing some pretty surreal events is what gives his writing charm and black humour. Despite the book dealing with sexual assault, mental health crises, family abuse, domestic violence, and a whole bunch of other things that I feel like a need a psychology degree to properly identify, Burroughs is a really funny writer. And it seems to be true for writing as in real life: if you didn’t laugh you would cry.

The discussions and treatment of mental health between parent/child relationships were what drew me to Burroughs memoir, because these are things that are very close to home for me. Having a parent who is pyschologically unreliable changes how quickly children have to grow up, and this is evidenced throughout Burroughs writings from how he talks with his mother to the intimate relationships he has with older men when he is just a young teenager.

I feel like I am jumping on the Burroughs bandwagon a little late here, but I am genuinely excited to read more of his writing. Sometimes in the book blogging world there is a pressure to always read the most up-to-date books, be on-trend, and get the advanced copy. Yet, books should have a longer shelf life than that (pun intended).

Are you an Augusten Burroughs fan? What book should I read next from him? As always, share the reading love.

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professional hair cutting scissors I came up with your article and found it to be the most interesting and where it is most informative and cool.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, running with scissors.

• About the Book

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 unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. At the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor, living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year-round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull, an electroshock therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing, and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

• Publication Date: September 5, 2006
• Genres: Nonfiction
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Picador
• ISBN-10: 0312425414
• ISBN-13: 9780312425418

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Running With Scissors (Burroughs)

Running with Scissors Augusten Burroughs, 2002 Macmillan Picador 352 pp. ISBN-13: 9780312422271 Summary 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 unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed.

The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull an electroshock-therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances. ( From the publisher .)

The 2006 film version stars Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Jill Clayburgh, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow and Evan Rachel Wood .

Author Bio • Birth—October 23, 1965 • Where—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA • Education—no formal beyond elementary school • Currently—lives in New York and western Massachusetts

Although Augusten Burroughs achieved moderate success with his debut novel, Sellevision , it was his 2002 memoir, Running with Scissors , that catapulted him into the literary stratosphere. Indeed, few writers have spun a bizarre childhood and eccentric personal life into literary gold with as much wit and panache as Burroughs, whose harrowing accounts of dysfunction and addiction are offset by an acerbic humor readers and critics find irresistible.

Born Christopher Robison (he changed his name when he turned 18), Burroughs is the son of an alcoholic father who abandoned his family and a manic-depressive mother who fancied herself a poet in the style of Anne Sexton. At age 12, he was farmed out to his mother's psychiatrist, a deeply disturbed—and disturbing—man whose medical license was ultimately revoked for gross misconduct. In Running with Scissors , Burroughs recounts his life with the pseudonymous Finch family as an experience tantamount to being raised by wolves. The characters he describes are unforgettable: children of assorted ages running wild through a filthy, dilapidated Victorian house, totally unfettered by rules or inhibitions; a variety of deranged patients who take up residence with the Finches seemingly at will; and a 33-year-old pedophile who lives in the backyard shed and initiates an intense, openly homosexual relationship with the 13-year-old Burroughs right under the doctor's nose.

That he is able to wring humor and insight out of this shocking scenario is testimony to Burroughs's writing skill. Upon its publication in 2002, Scissors was hailed as "mordantly funny" ( Los Angeles Times ), "hilarious" ( San Francisco Chronicle ), and "sociologically suggestive and psychologically astute" ( New York Times ). The book became a #1 bestseller and was turned into a 2006 movie starring Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, and Joseph Fienes.

[Although the doctor who "raised" Burroughs was never named in the memoir, six members of the real-life family sued the author and his publisher for defamation, claiming that whole portions of the book were fabricated. Burroughs insisted that the book was entirely accurate but agreed in the 2007 settlement to change the wording of the author's note and acknowledgement in future editions of the book. He was never required to change a single word of the memoir itself.]

Since Running with Scissors , Burroughs has mined snippets of his life for more bestsellers, including further installments of his memoir ( Dry, A Wolf at the Table ) and several well-received collections of razor-sharp essays. His writing continues to appear in newspapers and magazines around the world, and he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's Morning Edition .

Extras From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview :

• When I was very young, maybe six or seven, I used to make little books out of construction paper and wallpaper. Then I'd sew the spine of the book with a needle and thread. Only after I had the actual book did I sit down with a pencil and write the text. I actually still have one of these little books and it's titled, obliquely, "Little Book."

• Well, all of a sudden I am obsessed with PMC. For those of you who think I am speaking about plastic plumbing fixtures, I am not. PMC stands for Precious Metal Clay. And it works just like clay clay. You can shape it into anything you want. But after you fire it, you have something made of solid 22k gold or silver. So you want to be very careful. Anyway, I plan to make dog tags. So there's something.

• I'm a huge fan of English shortbread cookies, of anything English really. I very nearly worship David Strathairn. And I'm afraid that if I ever return to Sydney, Australia, I may not return.

• I will never refuse potato chips or buttered popcorn cooked in one of those thingamajigs you crank on top of the stove.

• And my politics could be considered extreme, as I truly believe that people who molest or otherwise abuse children should be buried in pits. And I do believe our country has been served by white male presidents quite enough for the next few hundred years. I really could go on and on here, so I'd best stop.

• When asked about what book influenced him most as an author, here is his response:  

Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz was the first book I read as an adult, at the age of twenty-four. Until this time, I'd never had the opportunity to sit down and read. Reading takes solitude and it takes focus. My life had been extremely chaotic. By the time I was twenty-four, I was already an active alcoholic. But during a brief period of sobriety, I went to a local bookstore and selected Midaq Alley out of all the other books, simply because I liked the cover. It turned out to be a profound experience for me. I was completely absorbed in the book, in the experience of reading. I felt transported from my life into a different, better life. From that moment forward, I was a heavy reader, often devouring three or four books a week. ( Bio and interview from Barnes and Noble .)

Book Reviews ...a bawdy, outrageous, often hilarious account...In keeping with this book's dauntless comic timing, this guy doesn't miss a beat. Janet Maslin - The New York Times

If you love Sedaris, you'll fold over laughing with Running with Scissors , a witty and hilarious memoir. GENRE Magazine

Bookman gave me attention. We would go for long walks and talk about all sorts of things. Like how awful the nuns were in his Catholic school when he was a kid and how you have to roll your lips over your teeth when you give a blowjob," writes Burroughs (Sellevision) about his affair, at age 13, with the 33-year-old son of his mother's psychiatrist. That his mother sent him to live with her shrink (who felt that the affair was good therapy for Burroughs) shows that this is not just another 1980s coming-of-age story. The son of a poet with a "wild mental imbalance" and a professor with a "pitch-black dark side," Burroughs is sent to live with Dr. Finch when his parents separate and his mother comes out as a lesbian. While life in the Finch household is often overwhelming (the doctor talks about masturbating to photos of Golda Meir while his wife rages about his adulterous behavior), Burroughs learns "your life [is] your own and no adult should be allowed to shape it for you." There are wonderful moments of paradoxical humor Burroughs, who accepts his homosexuality as a teen, rejects the squeaky-clean pop icon Anita Bryant because she was "tacky and classless" as well as some horrifying moments, as when one of Finch's daughters has a semi-breakdown and thinks that her cat has come back from the dead. Beautifully written with a finely tuned sense of style and wit the occasional clich ("Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal") stands out anomalously this memoir of a nightmarish youth is both compulsively entertaining and tremendously provocative. Publishers Weekly

This memoir by Burroughs is certainly unique; among other adventures, he recounts how his mother's psychiatrist took her to a motel for therapy, while at home the kids chopped a hole in the roof to make the kitchen brighter. Not all craziness, though, this account reveals the feelings of sadness and dislocation this unusual upbringing brought upon Burroughs and his friends. His early family life was characterized by his parents' break-and-destroy fights, and after his parents separated, his mother practically abandoned Burroughs in hopes of achieving fame as a poet. At 12, he went to live with the family (and a few patients) of his mother's psychiatrist. At the doctor's home, children did as they wished: they skipped school, ate whatever they wanted, engaged in whatever sexual adventures came along, and trashed the house and everything in it, while the mother watched TV and occasionally dusted. Burroughs has written an entertaining yet horrifying account that isn't for the squeamish: the scatological content and explicit homosexual episodes may limit its appeal. Recommended for the adventurous seeking an unsettling experience among the grotesque. — Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo Library Journal

Autobiography of adolescent trauma depicting the author's quest for survival in an unorthodox family alongside his quest for fabulous hair. Copywriter turned novelist Burroughs ( Sellevision , 2000) captures in his memoir a particular cultural moment in the late 1970s and early '80s when the baby boomers' flaccid if-it-feels-good-do-it ethos soured. "My parents loathed each other and the life they had built together," he writes. The estrangement of his increasingly manic-depressive poet mother and cold, alcoholic father flung young Burroughs into the strange Northampton, Massachusetts, household of family psychiatrist Dr. Finch, a jolly and permissive yet ominous figure who advocated intense therapy and nonjudgmental fathering. At his mother's insistence, Burroughs spent much of his adolescence living among the Finches. The fussy, hairdressing-obsessed boy was unnerved by their squalid household but became close with irascible daughters Hope and Natalie, participating in their substance abuse and delinquency, helping them wreck the Finches' dilapidated Victorian house. The doctor's pseudo-parenting encouraged the boy's sexual relationship with creepy, manipulative, much older Neil Bookman, Finch's "adopted son." When the doctor coached Burroughs to stage a suicide attempt in order to get out of going to school, our hero began to wonder whether life with the Finches would equip him, or Hope, or Natalie with mainstream survival skills-eventually, surprisingly enough, it did. Burroughs strongly delineates the tangled, perverse bonds among these high-watt eccentrics and his childhood self, aspiring to a grotesque comic merger of John Waters and David Sedaris. However, his under-edited prose is frequently uninspired and rambling, relying on consumer-culture references (from Clairol, Pat Benatar, Brooke Shields, Captain and Tennille, Sea Monkeys, the Brady Bunch, to Magic Eight Balls, etc., etc.) and repetitive sequences of abrasive dialogue ("Stop antagonizing me.... Just stop transferring all this anger onto me"). Presumably he garnered these details from his oft-mentioned journal, but they fail to deepen the characters. An unusual upbringing, reconstituted into a very usual memoir. Kirkus Review

Discussion Questions Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips) • Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction • Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Running with Scissors :

1. Discuss your initial impression of Dr. Finch’s practices. How do they change throughout the book? Do you think he’s unconventional or is he dangerous?

2. Many critics have classified this book as a comedy. Do you agree?

3. Rather than transferring guardianship of Augusten to Dr. Finch, what should Deirdre have done instead? Did she have any other options at that time?

4. Which member of the Finch clan did you sympathize with the most? Which did you dislike the most?

5. Natalie and Augusten were the closest people in each others lives. What made them so compatible? They were thought to be so close yet a single event tore them apart completely. Was their relationship real or a means of survival?

6. Which of Dr. Finch’s “methods” did you find most bizarre?

7. There is a revaluation towards the end of the book. Did it surprise you or was it expected?

8. After the initial release of Running with Scissors , the family sued Burroughs claiming it contained fabricated material. Consequently, the book had to be classified as a novel rather than a memoir. Still, Burroughs isists that all of the stories are true. Because of the outrageous nature of some stories, do you think that some details were exaggerated to put the author in a more complimentary light?

( Questions by Katherine O'Connor of LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks .) top of page (summary)

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Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Running with scissors book review

A life without a father and a Mother who is going crazy. When your back is to the wall and there seems to be no hope. “Running with scissors” is a story about when a boy named Augusten was parted from his family due to his crazy mother. He couldn't stand his mother and eventually moved into the Finches house. Dr. Finch(the mother's therapist) is a questionable guy. Augustine's life has ever been changed the day he set foot in that house. He has a new life to take on and will find a way to make of it. This book will disgust you. This book is really good at getting the life lesson through all of the disturbance. “Running with scissors” took me at the very start. I could already tell that this book was full of surprises and crazy/disgusting moments. Augusten Burroughs is really good at making you re-read something because you weren't quite prepared for what happened. “Running with scissors” was overall an amazing book to read. Its affected me by showing that, even a life that's seems to be ruined and have no meaning, with the power of friends and effort, you can restore your future and become successful. My reading skill has drastically improved after reading this book. It allowed me to see deeper into character and not just what's going on around them. The characters thoughts during the story had a great impact on the understanding of the book. I thought that the book was going to be boring, but after getting deep into Augustine's troubles, it was really an interesting story to be told. I like the way the characters communicated, and how each character was unique in their own way. The book was written in a way to excite and make the worse time in your life, the best times in your life. It took what seemed to be a horrible situation and made it a comedy to joke about. I like the way the story ended but it could use some work. I want to know what happened after and not just a list of what happened to all the characters after the story. It just kinds ended with no real path to follow. It was interesting but never wanted me to wonder about what's next in his life because I have nothing to off of. The book taught me that, in any situation bad or good. There is always a way to find success. If you put your heart and effort into it, there shouldn't be a reason to fail. Augusten used interior monologues a lot in this story. They helped get the reader to understand how he felt during the moment and his opinion on what is being said or done in the moment. “My journals were not funny. They were Tragic. “I don't want to be a writer,” I said automatically. “Look at my mother.” (Pg 172). This style intrigues me. I love to read about what the character thinks of what others say to them and not just yes or no answers. The way characters react to certain moments is interesting. He gives his opinion on his own writing in this example and then tries to connect his opinion to his mother to make his opinion feel right. He uses his mother to further persuade the person he is talking to, to why he doesn't want to be a writer. His mother is like an avoidance more than an inspiration to him. I highly recommend running with scissors. I understand it is disturbing but it will really catch you off guard and surprise you. I would give “Running with scissors” a four out of five. Some parts will be disturbing , but that's part of life. This book is for the adventurous and curious. Young adults would like it, because they can relate to this story and can connect to some of the trouble Augusten went through in his life to their own life experiences. This book is a must read. 680 words

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Running with Scissors | Augusten Burroughs | Book Review

Running with Scissors is a memoir recounting American author Burroughs’s outrageous adolescent life.

As a child, Burroughs was a neat-freak, obsessive about keeping his hair, clothes and surroundings picture-perfect.

His parents were constantly having violent fights and when they finally decided to divorce, Burroughs was sent to live with his mother’s psychiatrist, Dr Finch, whom he was later adopted by.

Life there was a total turnaround from what he was used to – the Finches lived in abject squalor with scant consideration for personal hygiene, and the children followed no rules because Dr Finch believed that anyone older than 13 years should be in charge of their own lives.

The psychiatrist and his children were nuttier than the shrink’s maddest patients, but Burroughs managed to acclimatise himself and form close bonds with the Finch children.

There was never a dull moment in the crazy Finch household and there are multiple moments of slapstick hilarity – in one incident, Dr Finch believes that God is talking to him through his faeces and he tries to decipher these messages, even sending his conclusions to his patients in a newsletter.

Running with Scissors has received a lot of criticism particularly because Burroughs was sued for defamation by the Turcotte family who claimed that the Finches in the book are based on them.

Mr. Turcotte claimed that all the events in the book are sensationalised and paint his family very unflatteringly.

Burroughs settled with the Turcottes and agreed to call the work a “book” instead of a “memoir”, but continued to maintain that all events in it are entirely true.

What is meant to be a funny semi-autobiography, also has a lot of solemn elements.

Burroughs covers a wide range of issues like homosexuality, mental illness, domestic violence, rape and alcoholism. It is a thoroughly engaging read, largely because of the sheer histrionic value.

Every single character is unique in their own bizarre way and the absurd events are comical and, at the same time, horrifying.

Regardless of whether Running with Scissors is the memoir that it claims to be or it’s entirely fabricated or (as I suspect) just exaggerated versions of real events, it is outrageously funny and thoroughly enjoyable; Burroughs sure knows how to spin a yarn.

Five on five but not recommended for anyone who takes offence easily or has a low threshold for vulgarity.

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She is walking through the kitchen...

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs 320pp, Atlantic, £14.99

"Yes." "So?" "Golly." "No." "My goodness." "Really?" and "Right". These are just a few possible reactions to a book. The reaction you are supposed to have to Augusten Burroughs's memoir Running With Scissors is "Wow!" But you might also think, "Oh, God."

Burroughs's first book was Sellevision, a satire on American home-shopping TV. In his new book he has successfully merged two other popular American television modes or genres: the confessional and the sit-com. Basically, if you took The Jerry Springer Show and had it worked on by the scriptwriters from Friends , you'd get Running With Scissors . Or if the Farrelly brothers had bought the rights to film Dave Pelzer. Or if Roseanne had read Douglas Coupland. As a pitch it's, like, totally out there, totally now - know what I mean? Really, really gross, but, like, so funny as well. Like last year's hot shocker, The Sexual Life of Catherine M , the book's veracity is irrelevant.

Burroughs grew up in Massachusetts in the 1970s, and he renders American period detail with a peculiar intensity. His mother's friend Lydia, for example, wears high heels and a white bikini, and sits by her pool, "smoking menthol cigarettes and talking on her olive-green Princess telephone". Clam-shells are used as ash-trays. There's a lot of Chanel No 5 and Donnie and Marie, and Burroughs occasionally rises to poetic effects that are reminiscent of early, faux-naïf David Byrne -"She is walking through the kitchen and out the other door of the kitchen. Our house is very open. The ceilings are very high. There is plenty of room here." Fa fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa fa.

Burroughs's mother writes dreadful poetry. His father is a university professor with psoriasis and "the loving, affectionate and outgoing personality of petrified wood". Burroughs himself is the kind of child who "liked to boil my change on the stove and then shine it with metal polish", and kept his hair "perfectly smooth, like plastic". He's a self-confessed nerd: "I would have been an excellent member of the Brady Bunch."

His parents are not at all happy: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "was the closest thing I had to a home movie", he writes. The parents divorce when Burroughs is 11, and his mother starts taking baths with broken glass, writing backwards with a glitter pen and discovering she is a lesbian. She abandons Burroughs to be reared by her psychiatrist, Dr Finch. Burroughs recalls the excitement and anticipation of seeing an actual doctor's house for the first time: "I imagined walls hung with exotic and expensive tapestries, polished marble floors, columns that stretched for hundreds of feet. I saw water fountains out front with hedges trimmed into the shapes of zoo animals."

The reality is much, much stranger. The house is a dump, smelling "like wet dog and something else". Dr Finch has a big white beard, wears polyester slacks, and is "very spiritually evolved". He believes in the predictive powers of his own shits and he practises "bible-dips", dipping into the Bible at random for guidance. Burroughs tries it. "When I asked: 'Will I like the new Supertramp album?' and landed on the word 'starvation', I knew that the album was a dud."

It gets worse. Burroughs inherits a vast dysfunctional family, including an incontinent six-year-old called Poo Bear, and a mad old woman called Joranne locked in a room upstairs. Burroughs hangs out mostly with the doctor's daughters Hope and Natalie, and with the doctor's adopted son, the creepy 30-something Neil. They play around with an old electroshock machine, tear down ceilings with their bare hands, and scream at each other constantly in order to achieve mental health.

Oh, and Neil forces Burroughs to perform oral sex on him. And Dr Finch persuades him to stage a suicide attempt, in order to get him out of school. (The good doctor also allows his 13-year-old daughter to set up home with a man in his 40s.) It makes you yearn for life that is, in Burroughs's words, "fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal".

So when everything around you is so corrupt, generally weirded-out and psychotic, what can you do? You can, of course, laugh about it - this is Burroughs's answer, and he manages to wrestle a pretty funny book from the huge, obviously sad mess of his childhood. The problem with humour, though, is that it can neutralise moral indignation, so the whole thing just becomes a joke, and what starts out as protection and revenge becomes an excuse. Despite all the obvious rage, there is no judgment here.

Burroughs makes everyone sound just kind of kooky. When the book's epilogue tells you what happened to all the various individuals in later life, you could be forgiven for imagining it as a credit roll. But you can occasionally spy a much more troubled Burroughs hiding behind all the relentless high camp glossing and the gags, worrying over all sorts of big questions about families, and about America. "Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn't drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag. So why did we feel so trapped?" The answer might come in the second part of Burroughs's memoir, Dry, to be published in America this year, in which he leaves the mad Finch household to become a hard-drinking "advertising hotshot" in Manhattan. If you can't wait for that, though, and you want to read another tale of lunacy, sex and naked ambition, there's another really good book of confessions I can recommend by someone called Augustine. But that was published a while back.

· Ian Sansom's The Truth About Babies is published by Granta.

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Movie Review | 'Running With Scissors'

Mom’s Wacky, Dad’s Distracted, Son Survives

By A.O. Scott

• Oct. 20, 2006

Like its source, Augusten Burroughs’s best-selling memoir, the new movie “Running With Scissors” is by turns hilarious and appalling. Set in an era of garish interior design (nicely captured by Richard Sherman, the film’s production designer, and his colleagues) and dubious social experiments, the film is a chronicle of adult weakness and poor judgment seen through the eyes of a bright teenage boy. Joseph Cross, a 20-year-old actor with an intelligent face and a pleasant manner (he also has a small role in Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers”), plays young Augusten, who is sent to live with his mother’s psychiatrist.

But that hardly captures the grotesque real-life comedy that Ryan Murphy, a creator of the cable series “Nip/Tuck,” sets out to portray as the director and writer of this film. Augusten’s mother, Deirdre, is played by Annette Bening in a performance that is a minor classic in the monstrous-movie-mom pantheon. Deirdre, whose husband (Alec Baldwin) is an easily distracted, frequently exasperated alcoholic, dreams of being a famous writer. Or, rather, she is convinced that she already is one, if only the world would wake up and acknowledge her gifts. Her son believes in her, or at least humors her, which makes her abandonment of him especially cruel, and also more than a little self-destructive.

Ms. Bening’s precise, pitiless tracing of her character’s decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have. As is often the case with adaptations of this kind, the loss of the first-person voice creates a dramatic void at the heart of the story. Engaging as he is, Mr. Cross often seems like more of an observer than a participant, and his Augusten seems curiously invulnerable to the madness that surrounds him.

Seeking solace and support in her crumbling marriage and her stalled ambition, Deirdre falls under the sway of Dr. Finch, her therapist, who hovers somewhere on the spectrum between utter charlatan and complete lunatic. Brian Cox, who was Hannibal Lecter before Anthony Hopkins took over the franchise, is very good at playing this type of character, and he is by turns charismatic and absurd, charming and frightening, channeling his own tendency toward hamminess into Dr. Finch’s histrionic personality. Dr. Finch lives in a huge wreck of a house — the decorating scheme, when it is visible amid all the filth, might be described as acid-trip Victorian — into which Augusten is dropped like a stray animal. He joins a menagerie that includes Dr. Finch’s daughters, Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood) and Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), and their mother, a fluttery, stringy-haired, terribly damaged enabler played without vanity by Jill Clayburgh.

Add Joseph Fiennes as a patient of Dr. Finch’s who becomes Augusten’s lover and Gabrielle Union as Deirdre’s new flame, and you have an impressive scrapbook of well-observed, offbeat performances, which is almost enough to make “Running With Scissors” worthwhile. The problem is that the efforts of the actors don’t add up to much more than a series of uncomfortable, funny-horrible vignettes in a scattered, shapeless movie. Despite the tale’s undeniably horrific elements, Mr. Murphy conveys little sense of real anguish or danger, and he holds the characters at arm’s length. With the exception of Deirdre, whose willingness to sacrifice her son and her sanity to a mirage of personal fulfillment takes a visible toll on her, they seem static and a little unreal, freakish specimens of human failure pinned to a velvet cushion so we can watch them squirm, and squirm along with them.

“Running With Scissors” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has many disturbing scenes of sexuality, drug use and age-inappropriate behavior and professional misconduct.

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Ryan Murphy; written by Mr. Murphy, based on the memoirs of Augusten Burroughs; director of photography, Christopher Baffa; edited by Byron Smith; music by James S. Levine; production designer, Richard Sherman; produced by Mr. Murphy, Dede Gardner, Brad Pitt and Brad Grey; released by TriStar Pictures. Running time: 116 minutes.

WITH: Annette Bening (Deirdre Burroughs), Brian Cox (Dr. Finch), Gwyneth Paltrow (Hope Finch), Joseph Fiennes (Neil Bookman), Evan Rachel Wood (Natalie Finch), Alec Baldwin (Norman Burroughs), Jill Clayburgh (Agnes Finch), Joseph Cross (Augusten Burroughs), Kristin Chenoweth (Fern Stewart) and Gabrielle Union (Dorothy).

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A24’s “Civil War,” the latest film from “Ex Machina” and “Men” director Alex Garland , imagines a third-term president ruling over a divided America and follows the journalists driving through the war-torn countryside on a mission to land his final interview. The movie is pulse-pounding and contemplative, as the characters tumble from one tense encounter to the next and ruminate on the nature of journalism and wartime photography.

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