Augusten Burroughs's Running With Scissors

Running with Scissors, a memoir by Augusten Burroughs, is one of his most well known literary pieces and is best described as purely psychotic. Burroughs’s memoir describes his childhood life and life as a teenager exploring these psychotic memories along the way. Burroughs begins with a rather lovely image of a boy watching his mother getting ready to go out but the reader quickly gets a glimpse of how this will change. Burroughs is growing up in a household with neglectful and abusive parents and later lives with his mother’s psychiatric doctor who adopts and lives with a multitude of his patients. Through this main plot, the reader gets an understanding that Burroughs’s life is not normal. Burroughs uses these peculiar family relations

The reader is introduced to the Stewart family by the introduction of Fern Stewart, the woman who took care of Burroughs and his mother after the divorce. Burroughs characterizes Fern as, “a perfect minister’s wife who shopped for teak napkin rings with my mother and enjoyed discussing contemporary poetry and visiting the local galleries” (Burroughs 80). By emphasizing that Fern is a perfect minister’s wife, the reader gains a sense that her life isn’t as normal as Burroughs believes. When on the outside looking in, this family can seem normal to Burroughs compared to his family but is actually not and is almost as abnormal as the Burroughs and Finches.The Fern family is introduced as a perfect sitcom family as Burroughs describes them, “Her four children each had perfectly white, straight smiles. Like Chiclets. Even the girls had clefts in their chins. And they always appeared to have just stepped from a hot shower” (Burroughs 81). This family is described as being perfect by Burroughs but he again recognizes he is more of a Finch when he quotes, “In some part of my lower brain stem, I recognized these people for what they were- normal. I also recognized that I was more like a Finch and less like one of them” (Burroughs 82). The Stewart family is quickly seen as not as normal as Burroughs believes when he says, “And when i opened the front door, there was Fern with her face buried between my mother’s legs” (Burroughs 85). Burroughs was completely clueless to the second life that Fern was living with his mother. The Stewart family defines that one can not know the abnormalities which occur in someone else's life and should not crave this life over their