Friday, August 5, 2011

Books 157: Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs


Running With Scissors is the memoir of Augusten Burroughs, chronicling the insanity that is his life from the age of nine to seventeen. From a mother prone to frequent psychotic episodes involving throwing Christmas trees off of the back porch, to his fascination with shiny objects and doctors, Augusten's life is anything but ordinary. However, things take a turn for the extremely strange when Augusten beginning with his mother's rather unorthodox psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, and his equally odd extended family. At the Finch residence, where schizophrenic patients live in the upstairs bedrooms and it's perfectly acceptable to eat dog food and make a homemade skylight in the kitchen ceiling, Augusten learns that any shred of normalcy that had been left in his life was now completely gone, and he liked it that way.

I absolutely loved this book. It was completely hilarious and legitimately had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion. There are so many things that sound too weird to be true until you remember that what you're reading is a true story, and then you mind is totally thrown for a loop. I swear, this guy had the most interesting life in the world, though I'm not exactly sure if I'd want to switch with him... Needless to say, I highly recommend it. 

Little did I know, there was apparently already a movie made of this book! I am so late on this bandwagon... I'll definitely have to check it out from the library as soon as possible. According to IMDb, it has Alec Baldwin, Gwenyth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood, and Joseph Fiennes, so definitely not too shabby of a cast.

Other books by Augusten Burroughs:
  • Magical Thinking
  • Possible Side Effects
  • A Wolf At The Table
Happy reading!

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