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Runnung with Scissors: A Memoir

The book Runnung with Scissors: A Memoir was made into the movie Running with Scissors.

Which one did you like better, the book or the movie?  There are 4 votes for the book, and 7 votes for the movie.

Book details for Runnung with Scissors: A Memoir

Runnung with Scissors: A Memoir was written by Augusten Burroughs. The book was published in 2002 by Picador. More information on the book is available on Amazon.com.

 

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There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table... Read More
There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe

Movie details for Running with Scissors

The movie was released in 2006 and directed by Ryan Murphy. More information on the movie is available on Amazon.com and also IMDb.

Actors on this movie include Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jill Clayburgh, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Evan Rachel Wood, Alec Baldwin, Joseph Cross, Beth Grant, Heather Clark (II), Kristin Chenoweth, Colleen Camp, Jumper Lark, Dennis Hurley (II), Patrick Wilson, Dave Schuetz, Amy Rider, Janis Jones (II), Jack Kaeding and Seth Gabel.

 

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