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.

 

about a bus ride on January 8

The police offered to take me to the detox center but I, of course, refused. I walked to the library and this girl followed me. I knew she hated me and was drama so I stayed away. But she gave me the finger from across the street. I still don’t know what I did to her. Soon after that, she emailed me a picture of her having sex with three guys, and she wrote a description about it all in the email to me. I did not know what to feel. Then I saw one of the guys in her picture sitting in the Safeway parking lot looking at his phone and shouting at it super-hard in his Mazda. We all heard it.

The age of your friends' anxiety

The author of the New York magazine piece "Listening to Xanax" declares this the age of anxiety and, therefore, of anti-anxiety medication: "If the nineties were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath." How did an editor at a major, reputable publication think something was being said here?

First we learn of a kind of situational (as opposed to compulsive) anxiety:

“Situational anxiety” today stems from threats that are both everywhere and nowhere at once. How will the debtor nations in the eurozone ever manage to pay back what they owe? How can Israel disarm Iran’s nuclear program without inciting the messiest international conflict since World War II? How can you be absolutely, 100 percent sure the cantaloupe you had for lunch wasn’t contaminated with listeria that will make you or your kids or one of your guests deathly sick?

Oh, anxiety can be scary, she confesses, but it also lives this "second life as a more general mind-set and cultural stance, one defined by an obsession with an uncertain future." Nevermind that the future is always uncertain, flashing warning signs up ahead--more to the point, nobody in the society she's talking about has suffered an anxiety attack or even lost a wink of sleep worrying about the kind of macro political and economic issues she describes. Nobody thinks, "Oh, Lord, what's Iran gonna do? I need a Xanax!"

Because this one was so weak, she quickly switches to another intellectually weak premise, focusing now on what is called functional anxiety--something she acknowledges that everyone has and has always had:

But functional anxiety, which afflicts nearly everyone I know, is a murkier thing. Its sufferers gather in places like New York, where relentlessness and impatience are the highest values, and in industries built on unrelenting deadlines and tightrope deals.

This obliterates her initial premise--that there's something unique about this age in terms of anxiety. But she soldiers on. Her sample functionally anxious subject says,

“I use my anxiety to be better at what I do,” says an executive at a boutique PR firm. “A certain amount of anxiety makes me a better employee but a less happy person, and you have to constantly balance that. If I didn’t constantly fear I was about to be fired or outed as a loser, I’m afraid I might be lazy.”

So, her overly dramatic but otherwise mentally healthy, motivated, ambitious, and competitive friends she describes in the language of mental illness. Here, she extinguishes all hope of having made a point: "Not quite a disease, or even a pathology, low-grade anxiety is more like a habit." In other words, something so ordinary I shouldn't have brought it up at all.

And from much ado about nothing, she explores what to do about nothing. First, she briefly describes folks who resist the drug-first approach, completely misconstruing them as shooting to "cure" her successful friends of their healthy habits:

A cure isn’t what the PR executive with the occasional Klonopin habit wants. “My own personal experience is that there’s a healthy level of anxiety, and I don’t believe ‘healthy’ is the absence of anxiety,” she says. “I live in a world that puts unreasonable demands on me, and sometimes I need help. I wish I could do it without the pills, but I can’t.”

Exactly--you're already healthy, and not this imagined poster sufferer in an age of anxiety.

Besides, no one wants to cure you or your stupid friends.

Notes:

• In the meantime, she ignores obvious related issues: differences in drug use by class (and hers is an upper class, to be sure), the history of anxiety and its treatment (in and out of psychology), the rise of diagnoses, the increase in medications and prescriptions, the trend of first prescriptions causing need for a second, exterior sources of existential dread over time, and on and on.

• Worst anecdote she gives: "A friend of mine had dental surgery recently, a procedure she both hates and fears. So proud was she that she’d sworn off Klonopin that she decided to forgo the medication ahead of her dental appointment. “I thought, Don’t be a baby. That’s just weak. You should be able to handle things.” She had a panic attack in the chair and was “a total bitch,” she says, to the dentist. “Oh, wait a second,” she reminded herself as the drill whined and the tooth dust spattered, “there’s a medical reason for these things.” "

• "Its sufferers gather in places like New York"? In places like ... New York?

Abuse your illusions

In addition to events in your personal life, this year's Carrier IQ story and revelations about mental illness and its treatment show that everything that seems good is actually bad. And if not actually, then eventually. But that won't change anything.

(Taking the Carrier IQ story to its logical conclusion, in the not-too-distant future we'll have contact lens computer screens. Soon after that, thoughts can be harvested and stored on Google servers. Then thoughts will be stored on a centralized, searchable database. Scary!)

Happy New Year!