On Hold RUNNING WITH SCISSORS by AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS - PAPERBACK

Running with Scissors: A Memoir (Paperback) by Augusten Burroughs.
ISBN-10: 0312425414, ISBN-13: 978-0312425418.

There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all.

This book was published by Picador (September 5, 2006). It is the paperback edition. I am not a professional book grader but I would consider this book to be in EXCELLENT CONDITION. This book was bought new and carefully read once. The edges are slightly bumped and the corners are slightly curled. The back cover has a bit of crumple on the bottom edge. The pages are crisp, clean and complete. This book comes from a non-smoking environment and has been stored in an archival box. It will be bagged and wrapped in cardboard when shipped.

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