Running With Scissors

Running With Scissors

by Augusten Burroughs

c. 2002

Picador: New York

304 pages

One afternoon, when the three of us from work took a side trip to Barnes & Noble, Krystal picked up this book from one of those little display tables (which will eventually be the death of both me and my savings) and told me that I would really like it, but that it was very bizarre.

And it was, and I did like it, but in a strange way. Reading this I got the same feeling that I sometimes get reading Chuck Palahniuk books: that feeling like you are doing something vaguely wrong and voyeuristic. Like you're rubbernecking at a really bad accident on the highway or something. Palahniuk frequently creates characters that are so messed up that just reading about their thoughts and actions makes you think "If those people sitting at the next table knew exactly what I was reading at this moment, they might be weirded out." At least I know I felt that way reading Haunted at Summer Institute last year.

This book has characters that behave in that same extreme socially unacceptable, shocking, horrifyingly strange kind of way. Only according to Burroughs, this is a memoir. He's not making this stuff up. Which only makes it feel more strange and vaguely dirty.

But kind of in a good way. Or at least in a way that made it so I literally could not put this book down (as in, I read one chapter at a particularly long traffic light.)

And so, like Krystal,I recommend it, with the "You'll like it, but it's rather messed up," kind of recommendation. If you think that you can handle (and this is the incident that Krystal described to me before I read the book) the family hovering over the toilet because they believe that God has chosen to speak to them through the shape and consistency of thier shit, (and I'm not even kidding) then this is the book for you.

Although I warn you, it's not for the faint of heart, or the easily angered, for there were certainly moments in which I wanted to slap several major characters upside the head and then lock them up for the remainder of their natural days. The psychiatrist that suggests that his thirteen year old patient could get himself out of school by staging a suicide attempt, and then provides him with the Valium and Jack Daniels to do just that comes to mind.

So yeah, it might be a little too bizarre for some people, and a lot too bizarre for others. But it is still a very good book. Even in the moments were I was repulsed, I was intrigued, and certainly involved. I suppose that anything that creates the kind of visceral reaction that I had to this book deserves a good amount of credit. Even when appalled, I had no intention of putting it down. And I now have every intention of reading Burroughs second memoir Dry once I get my hands on it.

So yeah, if you really like Palahniuk, I suspect that you will also enjoy this real life version, but if you read Invisible Monsters or Lullaby and were shocked by the strangeness of his fictional characters, I suspect that they reality of this book will be more than a little bit too much for you.