about Augusten Burroughs’ “Running with Scissors"

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.

 

something about Roger Ebert's autobiography "Life Itself"

Roger Ebert was a talented, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and writer who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he and Gene Siskel, film critic for rival paper Chicago Tribune, began co-hosting a weekly movie review show in Chicago. The no-frills program was picked up for national syndication and eventually moved to commercial network television. The odd couple—plump, mop-haired Roger wearing glasses next to tall, thin Gene—having tense, insightful arguments and giving thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie reviews became a pop-culture phenomenon in the 1980s and 90s. After 53-year-old Siskel died in 1999, Ebert continued the show format with other critics.

Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands in 2002, and his treatment and surgeries later led to the removal of his lower jaw. Ebert, disfigured and no longer able to speak, continued to write, and his blog attracted a loyal audience. He reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and was on TV for 31. Ebert was 70 when he died.

His patient, careful autobiography, Life Itself, is traditional and lovely. Ebert describes his parents, his childhood (including Catholic school), his career, his alcoholism (and then his pain-killer addition during cancer treatments), and his relationships, including the close, competitive relationship he had with Siskel. Ebert's writing about his disfigurement and condition is touching. I also enjoyed reading his views on the evolution of film promotion over the years and his descriptions of his interviewing habits.

 

Read some of his interviews:

• "Who's gonna get me a beer?" An interview with Lee Marvin by Roger Ebert, October 10, 1970
• Interview with George Peppard by Roger Ebert, February 18, 1968
• Interview with John Wayne (1969) by Roger Ebert, June 29, 1969

And one passage early in the autobiography sneaks in this gut-punch.

The optometrist had me read the charts and slowly straightened up. "Has Roger ever worn glasses?" he asked my mother. "No. He hasn't needed them." The doctor said: "He's probably always needed them. He's very shortsighted." He wrote me out a prescription. "Wasn't he ever tested?" It had never occurred to anyone. My parents and my aunt Martha the nurse monitored my health, which was good; I was in the hospital only twice, to have my tonsils and appendix removed, and had monthly radiation treatments for ear infections (they were probably responsible for the salivary cancer I developed in my sixties.) I'd never complained about eyesight, and no one noticed any problems.

Life Itself was published in 2011.

something about "The Good Fight" by Harry Reid

Harry Reid was the Republican Party's biggest Democratic villain before he retired and Nancy Pelosi took the honor. In The Good Fight, Reid shares his life's story, including his battles with the George W. Bush Administration over Social Security and war in Iraq.

Reid was born and raised in a Nevada mining ghost town called Searchlight, a place where the leading industry was prostitution. "I don't exaggerate. There was a local law that said you could not have a house of prostitution or a place that served alcohol within so many feet of a school. Once, when it was determined that one of the clubs was in violation of this law, they moved the school." His parents were a tough, booze-bleeding pair, and his boyhood home had no indoor toilet, hot water, or telephone. Reid emerged a scrapper from true poverty in Searchlight.

His assessments of his influences produces my favorite passage; Reid remembers Willie Martello, a "whoremonger," lecturing him about honesty, and pairs that with his parents' ways:

... They never taught me things about basic honesty—maybe that's why I had to learn about it from the whoremonger.

But this lesson my mother did teach me, and it's the most important thing I've ever learned: She taught me to have confidence when sometimes I had no business having confidence. She taught me that no one was better than me, even if it wasn't true. She taught me that I could handle anything that the world could throw at me, whatever it might be.

Reid worked as a policeman to pay his way through law school. He faced down crime lords as the head of the Nevada Gaming Commission and eventually was elected Senator and served as Majority Leader in Washington, DC. The Good Fight shifts coherently back and forth in time between Reid's tough-it-out rise and those hard-fought, highly consequential battles of the 2000s. Quite an enjoyable read about a one-of-a-kind in modern political history.


Notes:

• “Who I am now, and what I am doing now, began in that town, with those people, in those mines.”

• The book's full title is The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington. Reid had writing assistance from Mark Warren, whose resume highlight is his tenure as Executive Editor of Esquire magazine. Warren, a Texan, also worked on or directed several state- and national-level political campaigns in the 1980s.

something about "A Drinking Life" by Pete Hamill

A Drinking Life is a memoir by Pete Hamill, a New York-based columnist, journalist, and author featured in publications like the New York Post and The New York Daily News. I expected a deep-dive into alcoholism, but Hamill was never your bottoming-out alcoholic. Drinking, it appears, was something he did while killing time socializing in bars; it was not a preoccupation. This memoir, published in 1995, was born 20 years after his last drink. Hamill came to view alcohol as destructive and decided to quit. His sobriety does not sound like much of a struggle, which explains why addiction and destruction do not seem to be central themes in the arguably mis-titled A Drinking Life. Hamill's life, as relayed by the author, sounds mostly fine—so I found this a little dull and want to say only that there are far more interesting and compelling memoirs out there.