Since I cracked it open Friday afternoon at the airport, Augusten Burroughs’ memoir, Running with Scissors, has held my attention at every free moment I can steal.
Although a voice in the back of my head keeps asking questions; did this doctor seriously allow his thirteen year old daughter to have a sexual relationship with a patient of his- a man twice her age and her legal gaurdian? Did he seriously suggest and help Burroughs ‘fake’ suicide to commit truency? Who gave this man a medical license? Where are the actual adults in this story? Still, the boy with the box on his head calls to me from the coffee table.
Here I am 142 pages later, still enthralled. I found a particular passage that speaks to the teen angst in me. This excerpt is an excellent example of how Burroughs relates the everyday human experience to the psychotic or abnormal, which is so frequent in Burroughs’ life, it becomes the normalized. I hope someone out there enjoys it as much as I do (even though it’s dark).
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“I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.
For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks—accidentally—and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.” (Burroughs, 142).
Work Cited:
Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors: a Memior. St. Martin’s Press, 2002.
What Not to Do 