Running with Scissors - by Augusten Burroughs
Published:
Running with Scissors - by Augusten Burroughs
Read: 2025-01-23
Recommend: 8/10
I appreciated his honesty and the level of detail in his writing. I plan to read his other books as well. His work has given me the courage to write about my own life, even when it’s messy or unpleasant.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Then it was as if the lighting changed and a camera slid down a set of rails, zooming into her face. A musical score practically filled the room. She stood in front of the window so that her nightgown filtered the sunlight and her body glowed in silhouette through the fabric.
I sit. I stare at the TV screen and think how much I want a cigarette, but how I’m too uncomfortable to smoke in the house; how it’s still my secret that I smoke. Natalie smokes, but she’s braver than me. When Agnes or Hope or her father bitch at her about smoking, she just tells them to fuck off. But I feel like a guest, trapped in my own politeness, so I can’t do that.
I was upstairs in my rarely occupied room, staring out the window at the street thinking about that little Cosby bitch. She certainly didn’t have to choose between a mental hospital or the seventh grade. Why couldn’t I be like that? I told myself, All I want is a normal life. But was that true? I wasn’t so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal, I told myself.
The next time I woke up, I was in a bed and there was nobody on top of me trying to cause harm. There was a window in the room, but it hurt to open my eyes because the lids felt so heavy. It was like the light itself had weight, and was forcing my eyes closed.
“Look, Augusten,” she began. “I don’t want you to suffer from the same sort of oppression that I suffered from as a girl. Because I know”—she lit a More—“how difficult it is to reclaim one’s self. I’ll tell you, sometimes I wish I had been raised by a mother like me. You’re very lucky that I’ve done so much work, emotionally. And it makes me so happy to be able to support you.”
Dorothy viewed my mother’s propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish. “Your mother is just expressing herself,” Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen. “No, she’s not,” I would say. “She’s going insane again.”
Leaving the most awful and curious itch inside me that I couldn’t scratch.