Running With Scissors [Anglais] [Poche]

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 --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Broché .

"Nobody ever told me what to do, so why did I always feel so trapped?" questions Burroughs (Sellevision), in this flawless audio adaptation of his alternately riotous and heartbreaking memoir. At age 11, when the mood of his family home changed from one of "mere hatred to potential double homicide," Burroughs found himself abandoned by his unemotional, professor father and chain-smoking, wannabe-poet mother. Dumped at his parents' psychiatrist's roach-infested Victorian home, which contained enough confusion to keep his mind off the fact that his parents didn't want him, the author recalls in a voice as mutable and unique as his unconventional childhood the bizarre details of daily life in a home where bowel movements were seen as messages from God, staged suicides were a means of quitting school and sexual relationships between boys and middle-aged men were deemed acceptable. Infusing each character with personality, Burroughs most brilliantly captures his mother's distinctive Southern inflection with a voice that sounds like its been through a curling iron and the booming, deep voice of the shrink who adopted him. Despite the often heavy content, Burroughs alleviates this gravity with his unwavering sarcasm and humor, further enhanced by his knack for employing kitschy cultural references to the 1970s and '80s.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

This memoir by Burroughs is certainly unique; among other adventures, he recounts how his mother's psychiatrist took her to a motel for therapy, while at home the kids chopped a hole in the roof to make the kitchen brighter. Not all craziness, though, this account reveals the feelings of sadness and dislocation this unusual upbringing brought upon Burroughs and his friends. His early family life was characterized by his parents' break-and-destroy fights, and after his parents separated, his mother practically abandoned Burroughs in hopes of achieving fame as a poet. At 12, he went to live with the family (and a few patients) of his mother's psychiatrist. At the doctor's home, children did as they wished: they skipped school, ate whatever they wanted, engaged in whatever sexual adventures came along, and trashed the house and everything in it, while the mother watched TV and occasionally dusted. Burroughs has written an entertaining yet horrifying account that isn't for the squeamish: the scatological content and explicit homosexual episodes may limit its appeal. Recommended for the adventurous seeking an unsettling experience among the grotesque. Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

When Augusten Burroughs was 12, his mother handed him over to live with her extravagantly loony psychiatrist, along with the doctor's own wife and children and a number of extremely addled patients, some of them predatory. In this shambles of a household everything was permitted, including Augusten and his foster sister's decision to tear out the kitchen ceiling one night and cut a large hole in the roof to let more light in, which no one then knew how to fix, so no one did. Burrough's account of his deranged adolescence there is clear-eyed and often wildly funny. To hear it not only in his own words, but in his own voice in this fine production is ideal. B.G. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

It's hard to imagine a childhood more disturbing and relentlessly surreal than the one the author describes in this memoir. When his violent, nearly homicidal parents divorce, young Augusten lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his mother, a confessional poet battling a mental illness that manifests itself in consuming self-absorption and psychotic episodes. Deciding she needs more space for personal exploration and art, Augusten's mother packs her 12-year-old son off to the home of psychiatrist Dr. Finch, a wildly eccentric egomaniac; most of this memoir centers on Augusten's teenage years spent in this uncontrolled, profoundly bizarre household. Luckily, Burroughs tempers the pathos with sharp, riotous humor in stories that are self-deprecating, raunchy, sexually explicit (14-year-old Augusten becomes lovers with Neil, a Finch family member 20 years his senior), scatological, grotesque, and deeply affecting. Edgier but reminiscent of Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), this is a survival story readers won't forget. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

"Simultaneously hilarious and horrific." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

"Burroughs has produced a memoir that's funny and sharp, but also humane...as charming as it is revealing." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

"It's really fabulous, and what must be one of the rarest stories on the crowded memoir shelf." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

"If you love Sedaris, you'll fold over laughing with RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, a witty and hilarious memoir" --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

"sharp, riotous humor...deeply affecting...this is a survival story readers won't forget." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

"This is an American Grotesque...; that the tale is true only adds to the hilarity--and the horror." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, where Valium was consumed like candy and if things got dull an electroshock-therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing and bestselling account of an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Augusten Burroughs is the author of Sellevision. He lives in New York City.
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .