The book tells the story of Burroughs's bizarre childhood life after his mother, a chain-smoking aspiring poet, sent him to live with her psychiatrist. We are reading about terrible events for the sake of reading about terrible events.Running with Scissors is a 2002 memoir by American writer Augusten Burroughs. We are to assume that this book, as Burroughs has said of his other memoirs, is how he remembered events, not what may actually have been.Īnd we readers, if we choose to read this memoir, should focus only on what he is telling us and he is telling us that he suffered and continues to suffer. It also seems strange that with all the physical and emotional signs of abuse Burroughs displayed as a young child, no one outside the family _ teachers, family, doctors, neighbors, police - intervened in even the smallest way. Burroughs begins the book with memories from age 2, for example. While there is nothing to suggest that "Wolf at the Table" is fiction, it will no doubt be on readers' minds and certain facts do stretch the limits. Given the number of memoirs recently exposed as either partly or completely fictional - Margaret Seltzer, James Frey and Burroughs' own legal troubles over the veracity of "Running With Scissors" to name a few - readers are justified in reading with a grain of salt. Burroughs dishes out exactly what his readers probably wanted: unhappy episode after unhappy episode after unhappy episode. Throughout the first 100 pages you may think, "OK, so your father didn't hug you enough." But it gets worse, much worse, as we knew it would. This is a sad, if not wholly unusual story. Burroughs rarely speaks to his father in the years following and when his father dies, nothing is resolved. Guns are drawn in a made-for-the-movies scene and eventually, he and his mother move out and his parents divorce. The spell is broken and Augusten no longer wants his father's affection he wants him dead. During one such move, his father neglects and kills Augusten's beloved guinea pig. On numerous occasions, he and his mother move out. Alone, Augusten dreams of a happy family and a father who loves him. His father lords over the house and his mother, dealing with the same, if not worse abuse from her husband, withdraws into herself and often leaves Augusten to fend for himself.
Like most boys, Augusten sees his father as a larger than life figure. Burroughs reaches for his father's hand and is swatted away tries to hug his father and is slapped searches for common ground and is told to go away. At its heart, this is the story of a sensitive boy desperate for attention from his distant, angry father.
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