Man's best friend outside of a dog, 12: Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs

Due to a strange bit of scheduling, I read almost this entire book while sitting in the O'Hare Marriott, waiting to meet up with our ride back to Champaign. Let it be said, they have some really comfortable chairs, and are kind enough to not hassle people who spend hour after hour sitting there without any obvious purpose.

If World's Fair was about a family in which nothing too much happened, this could be considered the exact opposite situation. Burroughs' memoir, assuming it is even half truthful, deals with an upbringing about as unconventional and bizarre as just about any ever put into print. As to truthfulness, we'll leave that to the lawyers, and just evaluate the book as if it were a novel. I don't mean this as an insult in any way, because it's basically the way I read Bill Bryson, Erik Larson, and any number of other non-fiction authors whose style is more narrative than informational.

The obvious comparison for Burroughs is David Sedaris, as several hundred reviewers have noted. The comparison isn't exact, of course. Both are funny, and both are gay, but Sedaris' stories are more about minutiae blown up into shaggy dog stories, whereas Burroughs' childhood is so exaggerated that even if slightly falsified, it includes numerous felonies (with him as victim, not perpetrator) and events that should have required intervention by a host of public agencies. The comparison is inexact enough that Salon's reviewer slammed Burroughs in a three-page review for all his narrative flaws, but I find myself feeling vastly more kindly toward him. His writing style is indeed on the simple side (education was hardly his first priority growing up), but the material is so outlandish that it doesn't require verbal fireworks to jump off the page.

Burroughs is a very bemused, surprisingly detached narrator, whose adolescence was so traumatic that it is hard to treat his memoir as anything but a coping mechanism. It's a bit ironic that the family he lived with sued him, given that his tone is so nonjudgmental throughout that one could make a strong suggestion that there is a Stockholm Syndrome effect at play, especially in the case of the daughter who was apparently sold at age 13 to an adult mental patient of her psychiatrist father to be his girlfriend in order to pay the family's bills. This one seems to be on strong footing factwise, as the father lost his license as a result according to public records. In some ways, Burroughs blandness as a narrator could probably be attributed to his lack of finesse as a writer. You just don't always get the feeling he has much more to say about anyone around him. As a result, the appeal of the book is really at its heart the freak-show aspect, lightened up by its good-natured breeziness. I know I should look down on it for that, but it works. Even though his childhood was a trainwreck, the book is anything but, and makes for a disturbingly good read. I'm still surprised that I liked it so much, but I did.

The movie, it should be said, is faithful to the book, with some, but not all, of the more graphic bits removed or edited around. It falls into the category, in fact, of movies that hew so closely to their source material that they add almost nothing to the book whatsoever. Alec Baldwin's performance is good, but nothing else about the film is particularly memorable.