A Childhood So Strange, He Had to Turn It Into Satire

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

A Memoir

By Augusten Burroughs

St. Martin’s

304 pages, $23.95

*

Ever wonder what it might be like to grow up in a lunatic asylum run by the lunatics? Augusten Burroughs’ hilarious and horrifying memoir, “Running with Scissors,” tells the story of a polite, well-groomed, cheerful little gay boy who finds himself, like Voltaire’s Candide, being thrown from one bizarre situation into another.

We meet Augusten at age 11: a child of the 1970s who loves Donny and Marie, glitzy costumes and shiny objects. He is so keen on cleanliness and efficiency that he dreams of becoming a doctor or playing one on TV. Although he and his parents inhabit an elegant, streamlined glass house, their life is anything but neat.

Augusten’s chilly father, a mathematics professor, and his narcissistic mother, a transplanted Southerner who’s convinced she is a poetic genius, are constantly engaged in vicious fights that lead to their breakup. Next thing, the lad and his mother are living on their own, just like in his favorite TV sitcom, “One Day at a Time.” Only his mom is prone to psychotic episodes: “Not crazy in a, let’s paint the kitchen bright red! sort of way. But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way.”

Enter Dr. Finch, a fat, jolly psychiatrist, who looks like Santa Claus and predictably assures Augusten’s mother that selfishness and anger are healthy. “My mother’s face tightened with pride and she raised her chin slightly. ‘Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest ... woman on the face of the earth.’ ” But this does not prove to be a guarantee of mental health, nor do her sessions with the doctor prevent her from being in and out of mental institutions. Uninterested in her son except as a captive audience to listen to her poems, Augusten’s mother encourages him to spend time at Dr. Finch’s home in Northampton and, eventually, she lets Finch become her son’s legal guardian.

Life with Papa Finch, his subservient, crone-like wife and their brood of designedly uninhibited offspring is stranger than the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Anger is freely expressed. Children are considered adults at age 13 and allowed to do whatever they want. The house is knee-deep in garbage, the doctor’s teenage daughters never wash, and a 6-year-old nephew enjoys evacuating the contents of his bowels under the piano. This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s the doctor’s adopted son, a former patient, now in his 30s, who becomes Augusten’s lover.

One of the doctor’s teenage daughters lives on a hippie commune; another, Natalie, on turning 13 (“adulthood”), is permitted to choose her own father: a millionaire patient of her dad’s who becomes her legal guardian and also has sex with her. Meanwhile, Augusten’s mother is having a hot affair with a minister’s wife and can’t get over the minister’s lack of support of their love. On the other hand, she’s pleased by Augusten’s 30-something boyfriend: “He’s always been supportive of me and my writing,” she remarks.

When Augusten doesn’t want to go to school, Dr. Finch arranges for him to circumvent the law requiring attendance by helping him fake a suicide attempt. Over the next few years, Augusten and Natalie become friends. Although they’ve grown accustomed to the strange world they inhabit, even they can still be shocked by how weird things can get: “You really should write all this stuff down,” suggests Natalie. Replies Augusten: “Even if I did, nobody would believe it.”

If the author had used this material to fashion a novel rather than a memoir, the result might have been criticized as downright improbable. The nuttiness of the goings-on described in this memoir seem to exemplify the adage: Truth is stranger than fiction. The memoirist enjoys this advantage over the novelist: One can’t blame him for flouting the rules of probability. The more outlandish his experience, the more one feels inclined to sympathize with him. Even so, our only assurance these things happened is that the author says they did.

While some writers might have told a story like this in raw, anguished outrage, Burroughs (like a growing number of gay male writers) takes the path of outrageous comedy and satire. It’s an apt response to a world in which psychotic behavior is mistaken for creativity, sane people are berated as “judgmental” and “oppressive,” and “freedom” is just another word for not knowing what you’re doing: “Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn’t drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag. So why did we feel so trapped? Why did I feel like I had no options in my life when it seemed that options were the only thing I did have? ... More than anything I wanted to break free. But free from what?” A resonant question.