Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312938857
ISBN: 0312938853
Label: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2006-08-29
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Release Date: 2006-08-29
Studio: St. Martin's Paperbacks

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 meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile 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 glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's 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's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe

Customer Rating:
Summary: READER BEWARE! LITERARY TRASH!!!!!!!!!!!!
Comment: First off let me state that the first half of this book was well written. When you get to the middle of the book it goes straight downhill. I really didn't need to experience the vivid details of his first gay experience. I don't care in what fashion it has to do with this bizarre story, and if the man was a pedophile...AS A READER AND A HUMAN BEING, I DON'T NEED TO VISUALIZE THIS. After reading this filth, I skipped ahead to see if there could possibly be more. There was, and this time it was a full blown experience of anal sex. I am so pissed that I wasted so much time reading this to have something get so vile and vulgar so fast.

Even more, I can't get over the "hype" of this book. There were so many raving reviews of this. I am astounded and dumbfounded at the same time. A lot of reviewers compare him to David Sedaris. I can tell you that as a fan of Sedaris...This writer is no Sedaris.

I had such high hopes for discovering a new writer like this. I just wish that I had read more of the poor reviews. This book could have been so much better on so many levels. I found it to be vulgar, disgusting and the worst book and writer I have ever read before. This is not a "homophobic" review. The writing was just vile.

All in all this literary experience started out good and just went bad, really bad.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A great start in your Burroughs obsession.
Comment: This was a great memoir. My first Augusten Burroughs read AND memoir. Strange, witty, and sometimes uncomfortable to read, but all around enjoyable. The ending did upset me a bit... and please, STAY AWAY FROM THE MOVIE!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: about the worst book I have read during 2008, NO, I did not even finish it.
Comment: I tried to read it, I gave it a good shot but.... it's total trash.
nothing funny about it, plain trash.

I wish I could get my money back.
I just threw the book in the ...... TRASH !

don't buy it, don't read it.

Hans Muellers

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Creepy Yet Humorous
Comment: The childhood of Augusten Burrough's is for lack of a better word disturbing. The writer's tone is quite interesting and enjoyable. Considering how the book is a memoir written about the authors youth it can become extremely gruesome especially the homosexual love scenes between the teenager and the thirty year old man. The people that are written about in the novel are all very enjoyable to read about especially Hope, Deidre, and Natalie because the author writes about the women so beautifully. Every character has his/her own personality. I do think that it is necessary to read the rest of the books about his life to get the whole perspective because this ends with something that could be considered a cliffhanger.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: WOw
Comment: I have been a Sedaris fan for a while. But when I discovered Mr Augusten , I absolutely prefer him , its just genius.

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