running with scissors by augusten burroughs

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. I just look at her and she creeps me out. Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors. I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead. 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.īurroughs' perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. 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. 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. „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.” While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir Running with Scissors that speaks volumes about the author.

Running with scissors by augusten burroughs