Product Description

Presents a true story of a boy who wanted to grow up with the Brady Bunch, but ended up living with the Addams Family.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #165320 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir Running with Scissors that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "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."

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. 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. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. 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.

Burroughs' perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. 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. --John Moe, Amazon.com

Review
"'The Brady Bunch on Viagra' Observer 'Adrian Mole scripted by Hieronymous Bosch' The Times 'Running with Scissors sets a new standard... very well written' Sunday Times 'Funnier and more alarming than any memoir in recent history' Independent on Sunday"

New York Times
'Bawdy, outrageous, often hilarious … so flippant and so insanely funny (quite literally) that the effect is of a William Burroughs situation comedy.'

Customer Reviews

Haha!
An original account of Burroughs' insane childhood. Some parts made me wonder if/how much he was was exaggerating but a hilarious read nonetheless. Highly recommended.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
I am surprised at some of the reviews on this book. I know we all have different tastes but i found it absolutely compelling, sadder than sad, yet at the same time, funny. An unusual book with so much going on...i couldn`t put it down. My daughter thoroughly enjoyed it too. One reviewer does not believe it all happened - i wonder why..?
A book worth buying in my opinion, and definately worth reading.

Not to be missed
I'd never heard of Augusten Burroughs and it was purely by chance that I picked up his book and took it on holiday with me. What a find. I couldn't put it down and on the way back via Miami airport I found myself in Borders searching for other books of his. I bought Possible Side Effects thinking it was his only other book and didn't sleep on the plane back as couldn't put it down. Imagine my happiness when I discovered he's written others! I bought Dry (superb) and Sellevision (pretty good) and didn't leave the house that weekend. Fair to say I'm hooked and eagerly awaiting the next!