Running with Scissors

I first heard Running with Scissors described as funny and winced, because the setup is not funny at all. A boy with a volatile mother and an absent father is handed to his mother's psychiatrist and left to raise himself in a filthy house. I read the St. Martin's Press hardcover, 304 pages, ISBN 9780312283704, first published in 2002. I laughed in places and felt sick in others. Both reactions seem intended. Burroughs writes like someone who survived by making jokes at the exact moment most people would cry.

Augusten is nine when the book opens in the late 1970s. His mother Deirdre drinks, writes poems about Anne Sexton, and swings between adoration and rage. His father John is cold, drinks too, and checks out behind newspapers. They fight about money and custody and art. Deirdre starts seeing Dr. Finch, a psychiatrist in Northampton, Massachusetts, who practices a loose, god centered therapy. Finch tells her she must leave her husband to be well. He tells Augusten he can call him Dad. He tells everyone that rules damage children.

At twelve, Augusten moves into Finch's big Victorian house. Officially his mother still has custody. In practice Finch decides everything. The house holds Finch, his wife Agnes, seven children including teenagers Hope and Natalie, plus patients who drift in, plus a man named Neil Bookman who lives in a shed out back. No one cleans. Dog hair mats the stairs. The kitchen smells of old milk and ashtrays. A Christmas tree stays up for years. Valium sits in bowls. Finch reads the Bible, predicts the future from dreams, and lets kids skip school if they claim stress.

Living without clocks

The middle chapters read like field notes from a place with no clocks. Augusten stops going to school regularly. Finch writes notes excusing him. He watches soap operas with Hope, who wants to be a singer and practices scales while smoking. He smashes things with Natalie, who is angry and funny and steals from stores for sport. They eat cereal for dinner. They drink. They take pills from drawers. Adults notice and call it self expression.

Burroughs is good on sensory detail here. The sticky floors. The buzzing flies. The way the house creaks at night with too many sleepers. He loved hair and clothes even as a kid, and those passages shine. He cuts Hope's hair with kitchen scissors and feels proud for an hour. He saves for mousse. He reads ads for shampoo like love letters. In a house where no one brushes teeth, caring about shine is both vanity and self rescue. I understood it at once. When nothing else is clean, you clean one corner and call it yours.

Deirdre visits sometimes with new poems and new grievances. She tells Augusten she loves him, then tells Finch that Augusten is ungrateful. She signs papers giving Finch more control while claiming she will take Augusten back soon. Soon never comes. John, the father, sends rare checks and rarer calls. Augusten learns not to wait by the phone. Hope mothers him in bursts. Natalie defends him in fights. Agnes cooks when she can and prays over messes she cannot fix.

Finch himself is drawn with queasy vividness. Jolly, bearded, sure he channels God. He holds group sessions in his office where patients confess while kids wander in. He believes masturbation charts, dream dictionaries, and bowel theories that no board would approve. He charges little and forgives debts in ways that bind people tighter. Burroughs does not paint him as a movie villain. He paints him as a needy patriarch who likes being needed and hates being questioned. That made him scarier to me than a shouting drunk.

Neil and the shed

The hardest chapters involve Neil Bookman. He is in his thirties, lives in the backyard shed, claims Finch adopted him. He pays attention to thirteen year old Augusten. He touches him, praises his looks, offers sodas and comics. What follows is a sexual relationship that lasts months. Burroughs writes it plainly, without erotic glow. He shows how flattered and confused he felt, how Neil alternated kindness with threats, how Finch encouraged closeness by saying love has no age rules.

I want to be clear because memoirs of abuse get misread. This was not consent. It was grooming by an adult of a child in a house where no adult would stop it. Burroughs as narrator knows it now. Burroughs as a boy did not have words for it. He thought Neil chose him when no one else did. He thought enduring it proved maturity. He kept a journal with hearts and lies. Reading those pages made my stomach turn, especially when Hope jokes about Neil while not seeing the danger. No one sees. That is the point.

The book faced legal fights later. The family portrayed sued, saying events were changed and sensationalized. Burroughs settled, kept the text as memoir, added notes about differing memories. I mention this because it shapes how to read. Memory at thirteen in chaos is not a court transcript. Dates blur. Dialogue is rebuilt. The core facts of neglect, that a psychiatrist housed a patient’s son in squalor and allowed truancy and pills, were not seriously disputed in coverage I found. Still, read with that frame. This is one boy’s saved letters from a flood, not a neutral report.

Augusten copes by performing. He gets a part time job in a shop. He learns to shoplift with Natalie and then to stop when it scares him. He tries electroshock with a backyard machine for laughs until his hands shake. He attempts suicide after Finch coaches him to fake it to avoid school, then realizes he does not want to die, only to be heard. That scene is brief and flat in tone, which makes it worse. He takes pills, waits, throws up, goes back to watching TV. No adult follows up beyond a lecture about drama.

Getting out

Escape comes slowly, not in one run. Augusten stays through high school age without graduating in any normal way. He reads, writes, watches people. He notices gay desire in himself and tests it in secret encounters that mix shame and relief. He works more hours. He saves small sums. Natalie plans to leave for New York. Hope clings to Finch longer. Deirdre has breakdowns and brief clear spells where she sees the house plainly and then looks away.

The last third tightens. Augusten gets older enough to see Finch as small. The god talk sounds thin. The house rules, which were no rules, look like neglect rather than freedom. He starts cleaning himself up for work, ironing shirts in a bathroom while roaches watch. He applies for jobs with a made up diploma. He lies about age to get shifts. Those lies are different from earlier lies. They point outward, toward rent and food, not inward toward surviving the night.

He finally leaves for New York with little money and no degree. The final pages do not claim healing. He drinks. He struggles. The sequel Dry takes up addiction. Here he simply gets on a bus with a bag and a hairbrush. After 250 pages of clutter, that light packing feels huge. I exhaled.

School, work, and small exits

What helped Augusten keep a thread to the outside was work. A shop job gave him a schedule when the house had none. A manager counted the drawer. Customers wanted change. Those plain rules felt steady after Finch's talk about inner guides. He learned to show up clean, to smile on shift, to hide the house smell with cologne. Paydays were tiny. He spent some on clothes and saved some in a sock. That sock held his future more than any therapy note.

School barely holds him. He misses weeks, forges passes, reads in corners when he goes. Teachers mark him absent and move on. One counselor asks where he lives and accepts a vague answer. Looking back, those missed chances angered me more than Finch's speeches. A crowded public school in Massachusetts in 1980 had many kids in trouble. Augusten was one more quiet boy with long hair and jokes. No one had time to follow him home and see the bowls of pills. The book does not excuse that. It just shows how a kid can vanish inside a system that counts heads.

Hope and Natalie each model a different exit. Hope stays close to Finch, hoping praise will turn into care. She sings louder, cleans in bursts, defends her father to visitors. Natalie breaks things, steals, laughs hard, talks about New York as if saying the name enough will buy a ticket. Augusten watches both and borrows pieces. From Hope, how to soothe adults to stay safe. From Natalie, how to name the rot out loud. He needs both skills to leave without freezing.

Deirdre's money shapes everything. She pays Finch irregularly, fights about bills, promises Augusten clothes that never arrive. When she sells a poem, she buys gifts and forgets rent. Augusten learns to ask for cash at the exact moment her mood lifts, a skill children of unstable parents know well. Those transactions are short and sad. A mother counting singles on a bed while a son watches the door for her next turn.

What works is voice. Burroughs writes short scenes with punch lines that do not beg for laughs. A line about a turd on the stairs sits next to a line about his mother reciting poetry in a hospital gown, and both land because the eye is exact. He never asks you to pity him for long. He shows, then moves to the next mess. The humor is not cruel. It is a kid polishing a small clean spot while the house rots.

What drags is repetition and thin context. Days blur by design, but some chapters circle the same filth without new insight. Deirdre's poetry and illness get caricatured after a while. John's absence gets few pages, so the father wound stays abstract. Finch's other children blur except Hope and Natalie. Readers who want analysis of why systems failed will need outside sources. Teachers, doctors, neighbors saw this boy. No one called in a way that stuck. The book notes that fact but does not explore it.

The handling of mental illness needs care. Deirdre is clearly ill, possibly bipolar with psychotic features, but the book uses her as weather more than person. Finch's malpractice is shown, not explained. If you work in care, you may want more framing. If you survived similar homes, pace yourself. The neglect descriptions are sustained. Animal mess, rotting food, sexual coercion, drug use by minors, self harm. None of it is lingered on for thrill, but it accumulates.

Practical note. This is not a parenting manual or a legal brief. Read it as testimony. If you need facts, pair it with reporting on the settlement and on 1970s oversight of private practice. If you need help, skip the middle shed chapters or read them in daylight with support. The book will still make sense.

I closed the 304 pages thinking about scissors in the title. Augusten cuts hair through the chaos. It is the one skill no one can take. He parts, trims, shapes. People sit still for him in a house where no one sits still. That image stayed longer than the dirt. A boy finding work his hands can do while adults talk about God and art. He cannot fix his mother or indict his keeper. He can make a head look neat for an hour. From that small competence, a writer later grew. You feel the line from kitchen cuts to sentences. Both need a steady hand and a willingness to remove what harms the shape.

Would I recommend it widely? With warnings, yes. For readers of memoirs about hard childhoods, it stands with the frankest. For readers who want only uplift, skip it. Burroughs does not forgive the house to comfort you. He leaves it standing, roof sagging, lights on late, and walks away with his bag. That walk, more than any joke, is why the book lasts.