Running with Scissors

I stumbled across the author, Augusten Burrows while watching a Melbourne writers festival thingie on ABC before Christmas and although I hadn't read any of his books the interview propelled me to look him up.

He seemed to have had such an interesting (to put it mildly) childhood. During the interview he was actually more talking about the book A Wolf at the Table but I thought I should start with the most famous of his books.

Augusten is not your usual child, his parents are always fighting, his mother is a wannabe poet and his dad is distant. He knows from a young age that he is a gay and his parents soon divorce and he spends all his time with his mother.

Pretty soon she is seeing a psychologist, Dr Finch, who says she has a lot of issues and Augusten is spending more and more time at the Dr Finch's house with his menagerie of children, adopted and not, and bizarre patients some who have been living in his disgusting cockroach ridden house for years. Obviously this is where most of the weird happenings occur in the book.

The psychologist has strange methods and while Augusten paints a funny tinge over the whole situation, some of the incidents are really quite shocking. Without the humour injection the book really would just read as a tragic childhood story but Augusten makes it readable. The book basically runs through the time his parents divorce until he leaves home at around 18.

During the interview I viewed Augusten is really open about his upbringing and speaks with real honesty and I admired him for that, but I can't in all honesty say I really loved this book.

I appreciated its strangeness and the way he seems to step back from it all in some sense but some of the situations described in the book are quite confronting and it really made me appreciate my 'normal' upbringing.

I was surprised to see the cover of my book was set out like the movie poster, when I wasn't even aware it had been made into a film. After further investigating I discovered it came out in 2006 - I cannot for the life of my recall it getting any press in Australia at the time. I'm not sure if it had a limited season or if I just have a terrible memory but I'd be pretty interested to see how they handle some of the more sensitive issues in a M Rated film.