Running+with+Scissors+-+Panton

media type="youtube" key="KI3TD4_0DIE" height="349" width="560" Picador USA, 2002 **'Running With Scissors' a cut above** By Deidre Donahue, USA TODAY

Many of today's memoirs have all the originality of a Harlequin regency romance as penned by Barbara Cartland: the self-absorbed parents with booze/adultery/emotional frostiness issues, the isolation of school, the ill-chosen partner. You want to shout at the self-pitying victim: "Quit mewling and get a job slinging hash at a truck stop!"

Augusten Burroughs' memoir, //Running With Scissors//, does not evoke that response. (**Join the Book Club**: [|Discuss //Running With Scissors//]) For one thing, Burroughs had a rocky childhood growing up in Massachusetts in the 1970s. His bipolar mother identified way too much with suicidal poets such as Anne Sexton. His professor father drank rather than deal with his wife's illness before they divorced. And the shrink his mother saw was less a healer and more a total lunatic. Two things make Burroughs' book so compelling: his wit and his depiction of the wild goings-on in this large, strange family. The psychiatrist, Finch, has a wife and seven children. (And one elderly patient, Joranne, lived in his home for several years.) While few families could rival the Finches in weirdness, large motley crews of the biologically connected often generate bizarre activities. But the true source of //Running With Scissors//' appeal stems from Burroughs' ability to bring the 1970s alive. People mistakenly believe that it was the 1960s that were wild. Nonsense. Filled with cynicism and massive social changes, the 1970s sent upheavals rippling through middle-class America. Through the eyes of an observant teenager, Burroughs captures the '70s spirit of questioning every institution and tradition, from marital monogamy — Finch maintains his mistresses and Burroughs' mother becomes involved with other women — to traditional education. Burroughs hates his school, so Finch allows him to stage a faux suicide attempt involving booze and Valium. The school board then excuses him from attending school. And then there was the limitless sexual exploration. Finch's daughter Natalie and Burroughs, both only 13, were sexually involved with adults. Finch saw nothing wrong with his daughter sleeping with a 41-year-old male patient with incest issues. Although he conveys the pain of the era's young victims, Burroughs doesn't ladle on the clucking disapproval of those neo-conservatives blessed with 20/20 hindsight. Instead, he captures this strange, unmoored time in America, from the dopey TV shows to the obsession with talk therapy and expressing one's anger. The scariest moment involves Hope, Finch's kindly adult daughter who slaves as his receptionist. That all is not well is illuminated by her bizarre treatment of her cat. But the joys of young friendship come alive. It is Natalie who tells Burroughs that he is destined to be a writer with those diaries he keeps. In the end, the book celebrates Burroughs' resilient, upbeat spirit, which helps him surmount one of the weirder childhoods on record. Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of [|Gannett Co. Inc.]

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