A Normal Life

Just what is considered "a normal life?" In the case of Augusten Burroughs, it would be anything but his.

Burroughs' memoir Running with Scissors is a Valium-tinged tale of a boy whose psychotic poetess mother gave him away to her shrink at the tender age of twelve. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, besides having a "Masturbatariom" in the back of his office (guess what its for), is renown for his unusual treatments and habit of taking his patients home to live with him. Finch's house is a menagerie of madness in itself, as people are free to eat sink caulking, handchopping down the kitchen ceiling and live in the kind of medicated, mad craziness than Coleridge was only touching on when he wrote Kubla Khan.

Burroughs recounts curiosity after crisis after trauma in a matter that is both disturbing and yet raucously funny. Dr. Finch's solution to the young Augusten's boredom of the humdrum of junior high school and Augusten's hatred of a "normal" girl who happened to be the daughter of Bill Cosby, was to have him fake his own suicide. Burroughs wakes up in a "loony bin", getting his stomach pumped after ingesting the doctor's pills and alcohol, next to a naked man wearing a party hat sitting next to him on the other hospital bed. The man tells him that all the nurses and doctors there are crazy. Augusten lies back and thinks, "At least it's not homeroom."

Burroughs stories range from the odd (Dr. Finch believing that he can read messages from God in his own feces) to the tragic, as in the sexual relationship he developed with one of Dr. Finch's adopted patients. To note, Burroughs was thirteen and his lover, Neil Bookman, was a thirty-three year old man. Burroughs goes from being raped by Neil to being worshiped as a god among men by him. Neil's increasing obsession both fascinates him while it also frightens and disgusts him. Neil's fate is left open to speculation by the end of the novel.



Tragedy also strikes him in the form of his deranged mother, who claims to be on a constant mission to find herself. Her psychotic episodes get worse each year, as she goes from eating candle wax and then hefting seventeen-foot Christmas trees out the door. Between her and the doctor, she is kept constantly on a cocktail of medications to soothe her bouts of mania, however it has little effect. Burroughs sees his mother getting deeper and deeper into her own madness, with little comfort from the general craziness of the Finch household.

Running with Scissors is a powerful memoir about the drive of family and the power in one's self. Burroughs' life story is illustrated as so crazy, it might just be all true. Here is the story of a boy who ate candy canes for breakfast and lived anything but a normal life and survived to tell it all. He survived enough to end up working for an advertising agency at the age nineteen, with little more than an elementary school education, but a "Ph. D in Survival."

Burroughs writes at the end of the book, "Sure, I would have liked for things to have been different. But, roll of the eyes, what can you do? Shrug."

What can any of us really do but keep on running?