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The #1 New York TimesBestsellerAn Entertainment Weekly Top Ten Book of the YearNow a Major Motion PictureRunning with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus.At the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor, living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year-round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull, an electroshock therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing, and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.Running with Scissors Acknowledgments
Gratitude doesn’t begin to describe it: Jennifer Enderlin, Christopher Schelling, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Kim Cardascia, Michael Storrings, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press. Thank you: Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Robert Rodi, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Pepoon, Lee Lodes, Jeff Soares, Kevin Weidenbacher, Lynda Pearson, Lona Walburn, Lori Greenburg, John DePretis, and Sheila Cobb. I would also like to express my appreciation to my mother and father for, no matter how inadvertently, giving me such a memorable childhood. Additionally, I would like to thank the real-life members of the family portrayed in this book for taking me into their home and accepting me as one of their own. I recognize that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own. They are each fine, decent, and hard-working people. The book was not intended to hurt the family. Both my publisher and I regret any unintentional harm resulting from the publishing and marketing of Running with Scissors. Most of all, I would like to thank my brother for demonstrating, by example, the importance of being wholly unique.
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"Running with Scissors is hilarious, freaky-deaky, berserk, controlled, transcendent, touching, affectionate, vengeful, all-embracing. . . . It makes a good run at blowing every other [memoir] out of the water."--Carolyn See, The Washington Post
"[Running with Scissors] promotes visceral responses (of laughter, wincing, retching) on nearly every page. . . . Funny and rich with child's-eye details of adults who have gone off the rails."--The New York Times Book Review
"It is as funny as it is twisted."--GQ
"A hilarious and horrifying memoir."--Los Angeles Times
"The anecdotes can be so flippant, and so insanely funny (quite literally), that the effect is that of a William Burroughs situation comedy."--The New York Times
"Burroughs defies the 'woe is me' stigma of modern memoir with a raucous recounting of his loony teenage years."--Entertainment Weekly (grade: A)
"A memoir that is both horrifying and mordantly funny."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Wickedly, ridiculously funny."--Boston Herald
"Reads like David Sedaris writing The Hotel New Hampshire."--The Boston Globe"Burroughs has memorialized his bizarre childhood, showing off a dark wit that often rivals that of David Sedaris--while telling a true story that would make even Sedaris cringe."--New York
"Screamingly funny . . . In the end, the book celebrates Burroughs's resilient, upbeat spirit, which helps him surmount one of the weirder childhoods on record."--Deirdre Donahue, USA Today
"[Running with Scissors] will transport you."--Vogue
"Irreverent, scurrilous, profane, licentious, horrific, and vile. It'll warp your mind, upset the neighbors, and lower your standing in the community. In other words, it's funny as hell."--Elle (Nonfiction Book of the Year)
"Written with humor and clear affection for its oddball characters, Running with Scissors is a story of shocking discovery and unlikely survival."--The Onion
"Running with Scissors is Dave Peltzer with a whoopee cushion attached . . . you're just thankful to read a memoir that's genuinely memorable, not mawkish."--The Observer (London)
"Running with Scissors is a story so strange it could never be fiction . . . a huge critical and commercial success . . . deftly written, smart, and funny."--GQ (UK)
"A lasting treasure a gorgeously written true-life story destined to be cherished and quoted long after its last page is read . . . bravely stands as a life-affirming survival guide for all the misfits of the world."--The Tampa Tribune
"It's gross, it's shocking and its humor is blacker than a thousand midnights . . . But this hilarious, provocative, and oddly touching book draws you into a bizarre world and keeps you rooting for its unusual narrator to survive, thrive, and break free."--The Hartford Courant
"Brutal, disturbing, and often wildly funny . . . a stirring testament to a boy's strength in an environment of unfathomable heartache and dysfunction."--Star Tribune
"A surreal and entertaining trip through a young life most readers will thank God wasn't theirs . . . Burroughs never lets his readers forget that stuck in the middle of all the madness is a confused boy."--The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
"Bound to please fans of dark humor . . . Burroughs's account, full of frightening and hilarious images, is an entertaining, moving tale of an unconventional 1980s coming of age. It could be the one book you remember reading this summer."--Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"If you love Sedaris, you'll fold over laughing with Running with Scissors."--Genre
"Burroughs tempers the pathos with sharp, riotous humor . . . Edgier, but reminiscent of Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this is a survival story readers won't forget."--Booklist
"Beautifully written with a finely tuned sense of style and wit . . . This memoir of a nightmarish youth is both compulsively entertaining and tremendously provocative."--Publishers Weekly
"A grotesque comic merger of John Waters and David Sedaris."--Kirkus Reviews
作者简介
Augusten Burroughs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dry,Magical Thinking, and, most recently, Possible Side Effects, which were alsoNew York Times bestsellers. Augusten has been named one of the fifteen funniest people in America by Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City and western Massachusetts.
文摘
Running with Scissors Acknowledgments
Gratitude doesn’t begin to describe it: Jennifer Enderlin, Christopher Schelling, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Kim Cardascia, Michael Storrings, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press. Thank you: Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Robert Rodi, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Pepoon, Lee Lodes, Jeff Soares, Kevin Weidenbacher, Lynda Pearson, Lona Walburn, Lori Greenburg, John DePretis, and Sheila Cobb. I would also like to express my appreciation to my mother and father for, no matter how inadvertently, giving me such a memorable childhood. Additionally, I would like to thank the real-life members of the family portrayed in this book for taking me into their home and accepting me as one of their own. I recognize that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own. They are each fine, decent, and hard-working people. The book was not intended to hurt the family. Both my publisher and I regret any unintentional harm resulting from the publishing and marketing of Running with Scissors. Most of all, I would like to thank my brother for demonstrating, by example, the importance of being wholly unique.Chapter One: SOMETHING ISN'T RIGHT
My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Nate, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgun-shaped blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of her cheek.
"Damn it," she says, "something isn't right."
Yesterday she went to the fancy Chopping Block salon in Amherst with its bubble skylights and ficus trees in chrome planters. Sebastian gave her a shag.
"That hateful Jane Fonda," she says, fluffing her dark brown hair at the crown. "She makes it look so easy." She pinches her sideburns into points that accentuate her cheekbones.
People have always said she looks like a young Lauren Bacall, especially in the eyes.
I can't stop staring at her feet, which she has slipped into treacherously tall red patent-leather pumps. Because she normally lives in sandals, it's like she's borrowed some other lady's feet. Maybe her friend Lydia's feet. Lydia has teased black hair, boyfriends and an above-ground pool. She wears high heels all the time, even when she's just sitting out back by the pool in her white bikini, smoking menthol cigarettes and talking on her olive-green Princess telephone. My mother only wears fancy shoes when she's going out, so I've come to associate them with a feeling of abandonment and dread.
I don't want her to go. My umbilical cord is still attached and she's pulling at it. I feel panicky.
I'm standing in the bathroom next to her because I need to be with her for as long as I can. Maybe she is going to Hartford, Connecticut. Or Bradley Field International Airport. I love the airport, the smell of jet fuel, flying south to visit my grandparents.
I love to fly.
When I grow up, I want to be the one who opens those cabinets above the seats, who gets to go into the small kitchen where everything fits together like a shiny silver puzzle. Plus, I like uniforms and I would get to wear one, along with a white shirt and a tie, even a tie-tack in the shape of airplane wings. I would get to serve peanuts in small foil packets and offer people small plastic cups of soda. "Would you like the whole can?" I would say. I love flying south to visit my grandparents and I've already memorized almost everything these flight attendants say. "Please make sure that you have extinguished all smoking materials and that your tray table is in its upright and locked position." I wish I had a tray table in my bedroom and I wish I smoked, just so I could extinguish my smoking materials.
"Okay, I see what's the matter," my mother says. She turns to me and smiles. "Augusten, hand me that box, would you?"
Her long, frosted beige nail points to the box of Kotex maxi pads on the floor next to the toilet bowl. I grab the box and hand it to her.
She takes two pads from the box and sets it on the floor at her feet. I notice that the box is reflected in the side of her shoe, like a small TV. Carefully, she peels the paper strip off the back of one of the pads and slides it through the neck of her dress, placing it on top of her left shoulder. She smoothes the silk over the pad and puts another one on the right side. She stands back.
"What do you think of that!" she says. She is delighted with herself. It's as if she has drawn a picture and placed it on her own internal refrigerator door.
"Neat," I say.
"You have a very creative mother," she says. "Instant shoulder pads."
The blow-dryer continues to tick like a clock, counting down the seconds. Hot things do that. Sometimes when my father or mother comes home, I will go down and stand near the hood of the car to listen to it tick, moving my face in close to feel the heat.
"Are you coming upstairs with me?" she says. She takes her cigarette from the clamshell ashtray on the back of the toilet. My mother loves frozen baked stuffed clams, and she saves the shells to use as ashtrays, stashing them around the house. I am fixated on the dryer. The vent holes on the side have hairs stuck in them, small hairs and white lint. What is lint? How does it find hair dryers and navels? "I'm coming."
"Turn off the light," she says as she walks away, creating a small whoosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.
"Okay," I say. The orange light from the dehumidifier that sits next to the wicker laundry hamper is looking at me, and I look back at it. Normally it would terrify me, but because my mother is here, it is okay. Except she is walking fast, has already walked halfway across the family room floor, is almost at the fireplace, will be turning around the corner and heading up the stairs and then I will be alone in the dark bathroom with the dehumidifier eye, so I run. I run after her, certain that something is following me, chasing me, just about to catch me. I run past my mother, running up the stairs, using my legs and my hands, charging ahead on all fours. I make it to the top and look down at her.
She climbs the stairs slowly, deliberately, reminding me of an actress on the way to the stage to accept her Academy Award. Her eyes are trained on me, her smile all mine. "You run up those stairs just like Cream."
Cream is our dog and we both love her. She is not my father's dog or my older brother's. She's most of all not my older brother's since he's sixteen, seven years older than I, and he lives with roommates in Sunderland, a few miles away. He dropped out of high school because he said he was too smart to go and he hates our parents and he says he can't stand to be here and they say they can't control him, that he's "out of control" and so I almost never see him. So Cream doesn't belong to him at all. She is mine and my mother's. She loves us most and we love her. We share her. I am just like Cream, the golden retriever my mother loves.
I smile back at her.
I don't want her to leave.
Cream is sleeping by the door. She knows my mother is leaving and she doesn't want her to go either. Sometimes, I wrap aluminum foil around Cream's middle, around her legs and her tail and then I walk her through the house on a leash. I like it when she's shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donny Marie show.
Cream opens her eyes and watches my mother, her ears twitching, then she closes her eyes again and exhales heavily. She's seven, but in dog years that makes her forty-nine. Cream is an old lady dog, so she's tired and just wants to sleep.
In the kitchen my mother takes her keys off the table and throws them into her leather bag. I love her bag. Inside are papers and her wallet and cigarettes and at the bottom, where she never looks, there is loose change, loose mints, specs of tobacco from her cigarettes. Sometimes I bring the bag to my face, open it and inhale as deeply as I can.
"You'll be long asleep by the time I come home," she tells me. "So good night and I'll see you in the morning."
"Where are you going?" I ask her for the zillionth time.
"I'm going to give a reading in Northampton," she tells me. "It's a poetry reading at the Broadside Bookstore."
My mother is a star. She is just like that lady on TV, Maude. She yells like Maude, she wears wildly colored gowns and long crocheted vests like Maude. She is just like Maude except my mother doesn't have all those chins under her chins, all those loose expressions hanging off her face. My mother cackles when Maude is on. "I love Maude," she says. My mother is a star like Maude.
"Will you sign autographs?"
She laughs. "I may sign some books."
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Where is my father?
"Where is your father?" my mother says, checking her watch. It's a Timex, silver with a black leather strap. The face is small and round. There is no date. It ticks so loud that if the house is quiet, you can hear it.
The house is quiet. I can hear the ticking of my mother's watch.
Outside, the trees are dark and tall, they lean in toward the house, I imagine because the house is bright inside and the trees crave the light, like bugs.
We live in the woods, in a glass house surrounded by trees; tall pine trees, birch trees, ironwoods.
The deck extends from the house into the trees. You can stand on it and reach and you might n0 be able to pull a leaf off a tree, or a sprig of pine.
My mother is pacing. She is walking through the living room, behind the sofa to...
| 出版社 | PICADOR |
|---|---|
| 作者 | Augusten Burroughs |