Running With Scissors Book Report

The awe-inspiring and mordantly funny childhood that we encounter in Augusten Burroughs memoir “Running with Scissors” is far from the ordinary. “Running with Scissors” was rated #1 New York Times Bestseller and has since been made into a Major Motion Picture, which has been nominated for the Golden Globe Award.

Augusten is put into a weird situation when he is forced to spend most of his life in a run-down, dirty house with his mother’s shrink, Dr.Finch and his abnormal family. Dr.Finch, is a far from a normal doctor and takes his practice to the “next level”, as some would say. Using things such as his feces dimension in the toilet bowl, to decide on what will happen of his family’s poor financial problems. "It means our financial situation is turning around, that's what it means. It means things are looking up. The s-- is pointing out of the pot and up toward heaven; to God” (166).

The Finch family’s structure is also a long way out of the ordinary. Dr.Finch has two biological children, Nathalie and Hope, who are two extremely odd girls without much in common; his legal wife, Agnes; three other women he considers his wives; and an adopted son Neil Bookman who was once a patient. Other than the family Dr.Finch has a few patients living at the house as well. One by the name of Joranne who is obsessive over cleanliness who freaks out over a simple spot on a spoon that is brought to her room; did I mention she doesn’t leave her room?

Sexual exploration goes to an unusually heightened level. Augusten finds himself in an awkward relationship with Dr.Finch’s adopted son Neil whom is 33 years old. As does Dr.Finch’s daughter Nathalie, who starts to date a 41-year-old patient of Dr.Finch's with an incest problem.

I believe the book was very