Running with Scissors, published in
2002, describes an especially noxious and wild period in American writer
Augusten Burroughs’ youth. As the story goes, Burroughs’ parents, who fight
loudly, frequently, and then violently, divorce. Burroughs, a smart,
resourceful 13-year-old who is gay and neurotically image-conscious and clean,
stays at first with his mother. But she starts to suffer an identity crisis,
and her long-simmering mental health issues snowball. She sends her son to live with her psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, who is clearly insane and lives in
a dilapidated Victorian house. Also living there is an assortment of people
that includes Finch’s children (some possibly adopted), apparently a wife, and
sometimes live-in patients and drifters.
The large house is the home of a repulsive,
squalid chaos. It is without rules, without discipline, without sanity.
Although initially repulsed by the
set-up, Burroughs assimilates. He even forms a close friendship with Finch's
daughter, Natalie, who is one year older than he is. Meanwhile, though, Burroughs’
mother gets much worse under Finch’s care.
The book is run-through
with darkness and disturbances. Like, a sick 33-year-old squatter named Neil rapes
the 13-year-old Burroughs; then the two carry on a bizarre sex-power relationship
for two years afterwards. Everyone, including Dr. Finch, knows. That is
just one of the book’s rape and assault episodes.
Burroughs and Natalie
eventually leave the house together, but their friendship dissolves after
Burroughs fails to take Natalie’s father’s side when Burroughs’ mother accuses
the doctor of rape. The book ends with Burroughs’ decision to move to New York
City to try to become a writer.
A blurb on the dust jacket of the edition I read (St. Martin’s Press, 2002) affected how I read the book. Haven Kimmel, author of A
Girl Named Zippy, commented: “Harrowing and hilarious. I haven’t laughed this hard since
David Sedaris’s last book.” I understand the reference, but reading
this is not like reading Sedaris.
Some parts of Running with
Scissors are funny—I laughed when I read about Finch’s self-described office masturbatorium,
a room in which he rubs one out between appointments. But that is an easy laugh; Sedaris is a smug laugh.
Also, Sedaris writes tight prose and can be beautifully sentimental; the prose in Scissors is unremarkable, and Burroughs never sounds sincere.
Moreover, Scissors just seems
unbelievable. I assume Sedaris exaggerates, possibly straying at times into
fiction. He’s a storyteller and humorist. Burroughs, I suspect, goes further
and more frequently into fiction that he admits. He writes in Scissors about a
time when he and Natalie, both young teenagers, pulled out a window from a pantry
room and tried to fit it in a big hole they cut out of the roof. I just do not think that happened. And apparently
the irresponsibly, undeniably crazy Finch, who readily tells patients about his
masturbatorium and goes through a prolonged phase in which he divines in his
own shit signs from God, stays licensed and practices for decades, thinking that
the only threat to his practice is back taxes.
Burroughs ardently claims his work is
"entirely accurate" and insisted the book remain marketed as a memoir during a 2005 lawsuit filed by the family of the real Finch, Dr.
Rodolph H. Turcotte, who alleged defamation of character and invasion of
privacy. The lawsuit was settled, and afterwards Burroughs reportedly said “what
I wrote is the truth” and “it's still a memoir, it's marketed as a memoir,
they've agreed one-hundred percent that it is a memoir.”
Notes:
Running with Scissors spent eight
weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.
Running with Scissors was published in
2002; the defamation lawsuit was filed in 2005; the film was released in 2006.
