Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

genre: Memoir

publisher: Macmillan

2002

Augusten Burroughs’ memoir of horrific abuse, neglect and his mother’s mental illness is played for laughs. I don’t get it.

I am not the right audience for Running With Scissors. The veracity of Augusten Burroughs‘ memoir has been questioned and settled in a way that permits the word ‘memoir’ to remain on the cover. I have no idea whether that means that everything in this book happened as described, or that it can’t be disproven, or if it hinges on some hair-splitting about the definition of the word memoir.

It doesn’t matter. I hated this book.

Here’s a paragraph from the book that’s presented as a kind of a joke:

Princess Diana was almost like a parallel-universe version of Natalie. A version that didn’t give her first blowjob at eleven, wasn’t traded for cash by her father at thirteen an didn’t long for a job as a counter girl at McDonald’s.

Is that funny? Is it better if it’s fact or fiction? Burroughs would like us to both believe it and find it amusing. I don’t get it.

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If it’s true, then readers are expected to laugh at physical, emotional and sexual abuse of a child by her parent, who is also a doctor.

If it’s false, then the author is inventing depraved and horrific events and trying to pass them off as real…for laughs, I guess?

Burroughs’ writing isn’t good enough to pass it off as a kind of William S. Burroughs-style literary provocation (perhaps why this Burroughs chose that name). You can almost hear the author mugging his way through these stories, winding up for a punchline that lands like a preteen saying “…that’s what she said!” for the thirtieth time.

So much of this book is like if the Farrelly Brothers wrote the backstory for Jude from A Little Life. Then tried to pass it off as fact.

Little Augusten’s mother is so crazy that she gives her child away to a family that lives in abject squalor. Wacky! Her psychiatrist drugs and rapes her and commits her to a psychiatric ward! Isn’t that crazy? Or maybe she was lying! Even crazier! She brings home some random guy to be a new father to her son, who tries to molest the child while he sleeps! Oh, you!

There are several graphic descriptions of a 30-something year-old man raping a 13-year old. A licensed doctor lets his children run literally feral and enables their sexual abuse by adults. He allows his 13 year old daughter to live with a 41 year old man who physically and sexually abuses her. Pointing and laughing at this just seems gross.

If this was happening on your street, or to someone you love, would you be able to find the lighter side of it? I guess good for Burroughs that he wrote a bestseller.

Even NPR, when writing about the Burroughs’ family members’ competing memoirs, glosses over the child molestation:

Turcotte’s extremely permissive household was filled with his biological and adopted children, as well as several of his patients. During those years, Burroughs had an affair with a much older man, faked an attempt at suicide and dropped out of school.

I’m clearly not the right reader for this book, and I’m willing to concede that it may have aged poorly. Edgy material generally doesn’t (e.g. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective). But this was published in 2002! Am I just a prude? Did I just not get it? Can someone explain it to me?

If it was a news story it would be about rape of a minor, medical fraud and child abuse.

Whatever. I’m not a fan of Bret Easton Ellis either. Fuck this book, for real. It’s bad.

December 11, 2024