Running with Scissors

I found myself to be in a reading slump. After starting On the Road, unable to endure through his return to New York from the west coast, I had discontinued my summer reading frenzy. Almost two months after I put down my last book, I realized that I was tired of reading about the same five celebrities on the cover of every brightly printed page. At the airport, after two beers and a stomach full of nervous lead, I decided to pic up another book. Maybe I just wasn't ready for Jack. Reading this book was in a way my own artistic journey. I started in Lowell came to New York and I haven't quite achieved his level of momentum and flexibility.

I liked the cover. The orange tinted photograph of a boy with a box over his head intrigued me. Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs was a new adventure. Augusten, the author and the main character, lived a life that I never thought possible. The book details a life with out rules; where normalcy is a state of wandering and infestation. The prepubescent life of a boy in a broken home, started as a some what routine journey of a boy who was ignored by his parents. It seems horrible to say that one being ignored is routine. But, I feel that at the heart of all independent personalities, there is a link to feelings of parental abandonment.

Though Augusten started at the beginning, before hormones with wed parents, he wrote conversation in such a realistic way that I felt like I was watching tv. The writing as a whole was phenomenal. I not only found myself laughing out loud, but reading passages to my boyfriend. I finished the book in four day. In the end, every character in the book including the writer/narrator seemed to be on the edge of insanity. But Augusten's words keep him sane. His presentation of himself as a victim of a mad society, made his own intruquicacies seem justified. And I thought to myself, writing involves living amongst the most bizarre circumstances and finding your own sanity in the written word.

This New York Times bestseller is a must read. I must warn, there are a few sexually graphic chapters. I can't wait to read Dry, the sequel to find out what happened to Borrough's post teen.