something isn't right

[His 12 Greatest Hits Neil Diamond]

I'm going to quickly reiterate my warning: don't read this review if you intend to read the book, which I highly recommend doing.

Book: Running with Scissors Augusten Burroughs 8/10
This book had the uncanny ability to make me severely uncomfortable. I'm pretty sure that was Burroughs' intention, though, and succeeded quite effectively. Between the rape and numerous other messed up sexual relationships, shit prophecies, Poo Bear (the worst nightmare of a child I could dream up), and general uncleanliness found throughout, rarely a page went by that I didn't have to just laugh out loud to cope with my discomfort.

I generally don't like the idea of autobiographies or (I guess) memoirs about oneself (whatever the difference is). When I first started reading this, the first-person narrative really made the autobiographical nature of the book stand out. But as I got farther into the story, the more fictional it seemed to become (due to the incredulous stories Burroughs recounts), and the more I started to like it.

The story started out with a nine-year-old Burroughs following his mother around the house as she got dressed up and ready for her own poetry reading. Their relationship seemed caring and normal, nothing too out of the ordinary. Augusten was a very observant and imaginative little boy, taking pleasure in little things like the ticking a cooling hairdryer makes. This was about as far as I had read when I wrote in my The Giver review about how I didn't understand why this book isn't on middle school reading lists across the country.

Then we meet Dr. Finch, that fat sombitch (read as Jackie Gleason ala Smokey and the Bandit) with his sticky masturbatorium. Everything goes downhill for the Burroughs family once they mix their lives with this guy's. Augusten went from being a strangely well dressed pre-teen to a tragically hopeless fuckup with the turn of a page. The language, drug use, explicit and detailed accounts of fucking (that was not making love), the copious amounts of feces, and the all around anarchist-like (complete disregard for order) behaviors quickly cued me into why this book might not be appropriate for youth. Hell, it was barely appropriate for me.

All throughout the book, I kept expecting the end to be a real tragedy. Augusten never had a future, his best friend was Natalie (who I was sure was the worst of the Finches), and his mother was as bad a basket case as they come. As he explains it:

Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity. pg 274

[No Need to Argue The Cranberries] Zombie is probably in my Top 10 Favorite Songs of All Time list.

But all along, you know that somehow he has to have made it out of the Finch's grasp since he wrote the book. I thought maybe he and Hope (who was my favorite for a while because I thought she was the most grounded of the Finchs until she started to spoon her fathers shit out of the toilet. ugh) would pull a Bookman (what an asshole, I'm glad he ran away) and leave together. But surprisingly, it was Natalie that came out as the most successful family member. Maybe the Doctor's unorthodox parenting and letting his children pick their own parents actually worked in this case and gave Natalie enough distance from her family to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Good for her. And once her and Augusten left the Finch home to live on their own, he started to shape up as well. Sure school didn't work out for him, but who didn't see that coming? With his mother's help (I suppose she could be seen as the true savior of Augusten because she came clean about the Doctor raping her), Augusten finally liberated himself from the the Finch clan entirely and pursued his dreams in the Big Apple.

Like he said, they were destined for something great and were running towards the aforementioned light at the end of the tunnel, but they had been running with scissors. The scissors in this case are the Finchs, I'm sure. If their was to be one downfall in Augusten's life, it wasn't going to be his mom or dad, or even his lack of schooling. It was the Doctor.

As a final note, I'd like to explain why I write this blog through Augusten's words:

...I also wrote in my journal more. Writing was the only thing that made me feel content. I could escape into the page, into the words, into the spaces between the words. Even if all I was doing was practicing signing my autograph. pg 172

UPDATE:
I was recently going back through the writing I did over the past year (which was what led me to start this blog) and I found this little nugget. It's a little more long-winded than Augusten, but it still gets my point across. When I wrote this, I never intended for anyone to read it, so it's very stream-of-consciousness. I didn't edit it at all from the handwritten version to here, although I did cut one section out. It really didn't make much sense.

9/24/07
There’s something so alluring and glorious about the thought of being a writer. I feel like once I started reading (circa age 19) my drive to write has vastly increased. Even the simple pleasure of hearing my fingers quickly and gracefully tap dance across my keyboard is reason enough to want to being writing. The thought that I’m slowly running out of ink via my pen tip. I’m eating paper and breading kilobytes until my computer is full of typing. There’s an idea of freedom that seems to be associated with writing, and I want that freedom. I want to sit at my computer (typewriter) like Michael Douglass did in Wonder Boys in my pink bathrobe as it pours rain outside [transcriber’s note: it’s now dumping the first big snow of the season today]. Maybe even smoke a joint or two every now and then to get my creative juices flowing. I want to write to no end, or at least my own end, no deadlines. Create the life, and live as, of, and live as, another human being. Through him I could be funny, sad, emotional, elated, whatever I wanted to be. Maybe I could paint a picture of my ideal life or one I never want to live. I’d have the luxury of making it as sunshiny or hellish as I’d like, and be able to look at it from a distance. I could fulfill my fantasies or live my worst nightmares without having to take off my pink bathrobe. And if I could do it, successfully write a masterpiece, or at least something I’d consider to be my own personal masterpiece, then I KNOW that Ally could do it too. Do it better, in fact. She’s a much better writer than me, and I think that if she was able to get a spark of inspiration, her creativity could run wild all over the page and it would be represented so much more elegantly than I could ever hope to do to my own subjects. Maybe if I got a new computer (Apple: here I come) and got into a good setting (eg outside of Boulder, outside of school, inside a lot of free time) I could start writing. Often when I write at home with ally around, I get slightly embarrassed. Almost like she’s judging me. I feel like I’m a poser or something. Only established writers are allowed to even try. I don’t want her to judge me for trying to be creative (which I’m not, hence this autobiographical non-fictional story here) or for trying to be something I’m not. I do understand that this insecurity is stupid, unfounded, and unnecessary, but it still affects me nonetheless. Therefore, if I ever have a chance of writing, I also need a secluded space, my own are of the house, to work in. Coffee shops, cafés, restaurants, libraries and the like would work for out-of-house working (it’s NOT work, first of all, so ignore the word choice, and second, why would I be working out-of-house? Wouldn't Isn’t that synonymous with out-of-pink bathrobe?), but It would not suffice as my sole outlet for writing.

...

I think that step one in becoming a writer should be is reading. I need to read more. It motivates me, it tells me my likes and dislikes, and it’s fun in the mean time.