I didn’t like it.
It’s not to say that Augusten Bourroughs can’t put a pretty funny spin on growing up with a mentally unhinged family, getting adopted by said mother’s psychotherapist’s family, and having a boyfriend double his age (!), but the tragicomedy loses its Royal Tenenbaum’s “Hey life is surreal and filled with crazy people!” feel quickly and moves into that sick to the stomach feeling that comes when someone is so desperate for attention he doesn’t know he’s being raped.
I suppose I had this coming, I was biased by the film trailer which promised something zany, quirky, insane, but not quite horrid. I was expecting drug experimentation, yelling matches, New England prep-school ennui, but sadly, these were only fleeting themes and instead I read the particularly horrible tale of a very unfortunate boy leading a very tragic existence.
I’m going to get into The Brief History of the Dead this afternoon to see if I can’t change the tenor.
October 26th, 2006 at 10:22 am
I listened to “Running With Scissors” on audio book, as narrated by Augusten Burroughs. I’m not sure if the passive nature of listening to the book during my commute helped or not, but I was certainly ready to toss the whole CD set out the window for at least the first half of the book.
In the wake of the “Million Little Pieces” scandal, and in recently hearing a re-aired radio interview with Burroughs’ mother, I’m now questioning the legitimacy of the whole book.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6209286
At some point with these kinds of memoirs you do begin to wonder what point the author is trying to get across. Is he performing therapy on himself by way of writing? Is he confessing? Is he condemning? Or is he simply storytelling?