Running with Scissors Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Running with Scissors Book

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.comRead More

from£14.99 | RRP: £7.73
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £3.40
  • BookDepository

    Running with Scissors : Paperback : St Martin's Press : 9780312422271 : 031242227X : 01 Jun 2003 : A #1 "New York Times"" bestseller--the true story of a boy whose mother gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist--Burroughs's memoir is now a feature film from TriStar Pictures, scheduled for release in September and starring Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Joseph Fiennes."

  • 031242227X
  • 9780312422271
  • Augusten Burroughs
  • 30 June 2003
  • Picador USA
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 320
  • Reprint
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.