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    Running with Scissors: A Memoir
    Running with Scissors: A Memoir
    Running with Scissors: A Memoir
    Audiobook (abridged)4 hours

    Running with Scissors: A Memoir

    Written by Augusten Burroughs

    Narrated by Augusten Burroughs

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateSep 5, 2006
    ISBN9781427200563
    Running with Scissors: A Memoir
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for Running with Scissors

    3.5/5

    4,732 ratings173 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Very funny. stories about wacky mother are hilarious. enjoyed references to brother first. I read augstens brother book first because my longtime bf is aspergers, so books on that topic interest me. glad this happened because now I will read more of augstens books.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      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."
    • 5/5
      A captivating and well written story. Highly entertaining. I loved it.
    • 4/5
      Entertaining for sure. I read this after reading the author’s memoir Dry. And I actually liked Dry quite better. While this memoir had a lot of wild stories, I didn’t gather as much overall meaning from it as I did from Dry, which did an excellent job of putting you inside the mind of an alcoholic.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      I quit listening when he felt the need to describe himself at 12 having gay sex. Blecch. No thanks
    • 5/5
      When I read this I was in a struggle of my own, and while wholly different than the challenges of the author I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I loved his sense of humor, and of course, it was better than the movie.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this story, kept me focused! I would recommend this to a friend.
    • 5/5
      Gripping and humorous tale of a dysfunctional childhood. The only part I didn't like was the two-page epilogue.
    • 4/5
      The tone was troubling., I didn't really laugh ...
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      I'm not sure a few of these reviews were from actual humans that endured childhood trauma in the least, and they, without doubt, never did what they had to do to survive that childhood while an adult. My sarcasm is to say if you do not ever use morbid humour at the worst times, you will have triggers double-tapped trying to make it through any chapter in this beautifully worded and well-written memoir as the author remembers his life, and for me, what makes this memoir even better is not only can you find that one of his (only) siblings wrote a powerful memoir but the authors Mother also did, showing us the reader greater insight into this memoir. Augusten Burroughs gives us, with inappropriate, morbid or awkward humour, a chance to know we are not alone. We're not alone in our choices to survive our lives, and it allows us, the reader, to feel good about those situations we outlast.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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!
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      This was hilarious and engaging, but if you're tempted to watch the film, don't. It just sucked. The book is much better.
    • 5/5
      I loved every minute of this book. It is crazy, refreshing, funny, sad and horrifying all at the same time. This must be the book that best captures the thoughts and experiences of a gay boy-child's life.
    • 4/5
      This was the one of thee wildest autobiography I’ve ever listened to. My heart aches for him because he never had anyone to give him the love or protection he needed. But I was glad he had Natalie. In the the tornado of there lives the found light and made a nice life for themselves. But the adults in his life should have been arrested !!! Especially Neil!!
    • 1/5
      the book is boring and disgusting. Not funny at all, it's a story of an abused boy who becomes insensitive and dull about the world.
      how can it be funny?

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      Run away from this book!
    • 3/5
      Just okay. There are so many fantastic memoirs out there, and this one was good, but fell short for me.