Literary Analysis Of Running With Scissors By Augusten Burroughs

Running with Scissors is a memoir written by Augusten Burroughs. The setting of this memoir is Massachusetts, where Burroughs lives with his mother and father. Even though they are married when the memoir begins, both parents are extremely unstable emotionally. His father is an alcoholic and works as a professor at a local university. His mother is a poem writer, and Augusten admires his mother greatly. She has become obsessed with becoming a famous author. Both of his parents are very negligent towards him in a variety of ways. Augusten is infatuated with having control of every situation. He is obsessed with obtaining shiny things, and is very particular about his appearance. As his parents’ marriage begins to get worse, fights between the two often end in some form of violence. After a tremendously bad fight, Dr. Finch comes over to their house and encourages Augusten’s mother to leave his father. Augusten’s mother is so terrified of his father that

In this passage, Augusten has finally made it into college and he is working in his first English class. This class is focusing only on the technical parts of the language and less on writing. Augusten would go on to be a published writer, which makes it all the more ironic that he is failing at midterm. This supports the idea that we shouldn’t try to force every person into one kind of instruction. Just because Augusten was failing English, that did not mean that he was incapable of learning, it simply meant that the class was not reaching him in the right way. I will learn to understand that not the same kind of therapy will work for every patient just like this teacher was teaching one way and he could not learn for his style of teaching. Making changes to my style of therapy will help me to gain trust and confidence from my patients and will reassure them that I and there for one thing and one thing only: to help