The title of the said book, by Augusten Burroughs, sounds absurd, even non-sensical but that is just a sign of what you're in for; its contents will flip your notions of what is normal and abnormal.
It's about:
This memoir document the tumultuous childhood of Augusten. He was raised in a dysfunctional family of a delusional mother, alcoholic father and autistic brother. As a young boy, Augusten had a fetish for shiny objects and doctor's offices, hated school and dreamt of being a movie star. As his parents animosity got worse, they consulted an unorthodox psychiatrist called Dr. Finch. One day, Augusten's mother sent him to the Finches to stay while she went to a motel to recuperate from her psychosis. Eventually, she'd let Dr. Finch adopt him.
He encountered all sorts of things under the sun possible while living with the Finches in their dilapidated Victorian squalor. These include: turd-reading, ceiling-bashing, bible-dipping, eating dog chow, using an old electroshock chair as entertainment. Augusten, who was gay, had also developed an ambivalent relationship with the Finches adopted pedophile son. Most alarming (and ridiculous) of all was the way Freudian psychology and practice was encouraged, like psychosexual development and projection.
Finch believed that anger was the crux of mental illness. He believed that anger, unless it was expressed freely, would destroy a person... So we screamed at each other constantly. It was like a competition and the prize was mental health. Every so often Finch would say, "Hope has been expressing a lot of healthy anger lately. I truly believe she's moved up to the next level in the stages of her emotional development. She's leaving the anal and moving into the phallic." So then everybody hated Hope because she walked around being so smug and emotionally mature.
As Augusten grows closer to the Finches, he too grows up and matures in ways unexpected.
My thoughts:
Each chapter of this memoir left me with an array of feelings - of dumbfoundedness like huh, I can't believe people actually do such things!, repulsion especially at the graphic RA-ted scenes, horror and sadness
[...] fter reading Augusten Burrough’s Running with Scissors, I was enamored by his dysfunctional life, but more importantly, his style of writing – a [...]
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