Running With Scissors: A Memoir

“I could polish my 14k gold-plated signet ring with a Q-tip until the gold plating wore off even if I couldn’t stop my parents from throwing John Updike novels at each other’s heads.”

Augusten realizes that his obsession with shiny things and cleanliness doesn’t seem normal and results from a coping mechanism he developed in response to his parents’ toxic relationship. His early life is largely defined by the way his parents interact with one another, and he bears witness to their abuse and violence. This unwittingly prepares him for the chaos he endures later on with the Finches.

“As my mother saw more and more of Dr. Finch over the year, I needed to be reminded constantly that he was a real doctor.”

Augusten foreshadows Dr. Finch’s malpractice and the harm that he causes over the coming years. When he’s first introduced to Dr. Finch, the doctor doesn’t fit the stereotype of what Augusten envisions a doctor to be. He’s instead overly casual, sexual, and aloof regarding medication. Eventually, Augusten starts spending time with the Finch family and then moves in with them, and he learns the true extent of Finch’s oddness as well as its effect on his family.

“She had come back for me, just like she said she would. Only, where was she?”

Augusten’s relationship with his mother is strained and confusing, and this only worsens when Dierdre starts seeing Dr. Finch. He medicates her and isolates her from Augusten, slowly convincing her to leave him with the Finches and become independent of her son. After the first time that Augusten is left with the Finches for a week, his mother comes back for him but seems different. She’s cold and distant and seems completely unfazed by having been away from Augusten for a week. This quote helps illuminate the theme of The Complex Nature of Family Relationships.

“As I spent more and more time with the Finches during that year, I could feel myself changing in profound ways, with stunning speed. I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.”

Supporting the theme Accelerated Adolescence, as Augusten spends more time with the Finches and eventually moves in with them, he’s permitted to do things that aren’t age appropriate. When he first meets the family, he’s 12 years old and is highly impressionable as well as extremely naive. The Finch’s strange ways quickly take hold of Augusten, changing his standards and exposing him to harmful figures like Neil. Augusten’s time with the Finches shapes the person he grows up to be.

“I had nothing in common with these kids. They had moms that nibbled matchstick-thin slices of carrot. And I had a mom that ate matchsticks.”

All his life, Augusten feels different from other children. During his childhood, he blames his mother for this, believing that her mental health condition and influence over him are largely the reason for his oddness. He sees himself as distinct from his peers because their families appear normal and his isn’t; not until he’s older and learns more about the hidden lives of adults is he able to see that normalcy doesn’t really exist, foregrounding the theme of The Illusion of “Normal.”

“Then it was as if the lighting changed and a camera slid down a set of rails, zooming into her face. A musical score practically filled the room. She stood in front of the window so that her nightgown filtered the sunlight and her body glowed in silhouette through the fabric.”

When Dierdre has a psychotic episode, she becomes extremely narcissistic, verbose, and grandiose. She often engages in long monologues about how difficult her life is, how she has always been oppressed by men, and how she’s destined for fame and success. During these moments, Augusten’s childhood imagination reactivates, and visions of his mother as a famous celebrity return in a new form. Rather than viewing his mother from a position of worship, he now sees her grandiosity as desperate and sometimes pathetic.

“Anger was like the ground hamburger of our existence. Its versatility was inspiring. There was Anger Turned Inward, Repressed Anger, Misguided Anger. There were Acts Made in Anger, Things Said in Anger and people who might very well die if they didn’t Face Their Anger. So we screamed at each other constantly.”

Anger is a powerful motivator and propels major events in Augusten’s life. Anger leads his parents to abuse one another and eventually to separate, and Augusten’s exposure to anger doesn’t end there. Instead, he’s exposed to regular outbursts and physical altercations at the Finch house, often between siblings. Dr. Finch engages in many harmful treatments and approaches to life, and one of these is encouraging the uninhibited expression of anger. He not only refrains from disciplining his children when they act out this way but actively encourages it.

“There was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal, I told myself.”

Augusten spends much of his time worrying whether he’s normal or will one day end up ill like his mother. He realizes that he thrives on the chaos of his mother’s moods and the Finches’ unconventional lifestyle, and he dislikes the idea of a boring, regular existence. At the same time, he wants to want to be normal and tries to convince himself to desire that type of life. Having grown up with Dierdre, Augusten seems destined to live an unusual life. This Illusion of “Normal” is a theme that follows Augusten throughout his adolescence, and not until he’s nearly an adult does he begin to finally accept being strange.

“Instead of going to school and drawing happy faces in my notebook or hunkering over a joint on the soccer field, I was seeing black-and-white films by Lina Wertmuller, French movies where first cousins fall in love and then stab each other as a weeping clown appears, representing the loss of innocence.”

Augusten rarely goes to school, instead spending his days writing in his journal or seeing black-and-white movies at the theater. Many of these films carry a theme of Accelerated Adolescence and the traumatic experiences that thrust a person out of childhood and into adulthood. This theme carries throughout the book as Augusten grows up and is exposed to countless adult-themed events.

“This is what bonds us, Natalie and me. We are living in the same madhouse and have gone through the same mad thing and have our bad, ugly loves.”

While living with the Finches, Augusten develops a close friendship with Natalie. They bond over their shared experiences of trauma, abuse, and skepticism of the future. Before moving back to the Finch home, Natalie spent a few years of her adolescence living with an adult man who abused her and used her. This resulted from Dr. Finch’s policy of allowing total freedom at age 13. Augusten experiences a similar type of abuse at the hands of Neil, likewise largely as a result of Dr. Finch’s and his own mother’s lax attitude toward boundaries. Both Augusten and Natalie thus experience an Accelerated Adolescence that shapes the people they become.

“One minute we were sitting at the lowly kitchen table moaning about the sorry state of our lives and the next we were liberating the architecture with heavy projectiles. This was pure, freedom. Better than sniffing glue.”

Augusten and Natalie bond over their abusive relationships with adult men and their shared distaste for the lives they lead. One night, they have a mutually cathartic experience when Natalie decides on a whim to break open the kitchen ceiling and install a makeshift skylight. She and Augusten stand on the kitchen table and bash in the ceiling as rubble falls around them, symbolizing their rebellion against conforming to the rest of the world.

“I’m in my mother’s psychiatrist’s house for god’s sake, eating candy canes for breakfast.”

Augusten occasionally includes journal entries in his book, and in one such entry, he’s incredulous over the state of his life and the Finch family. Worried that he’ll never achieve his dream of owning a hair empire and being important, he examines his life and feels that he has little to offer his own future. This quote acts as a microcosm of the absurdity and chaos that surrounds Augusten daily.

“I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future—what will happen next?—I didn’t have to feel so much about what was going on in the present.”

After years of living amid chaos and emotional turmoil, Augusten develops coping skills. These coping skills are in some ways unhealthy but are in other ways the reason he survives. After Hope kills her cat due to a delusion that it asked her for assistance in its death, Augusten feels sad but only in part. He has learned to compartmentalize his emotions and traumatic experiences by focusing on the future instead of the present.

“I liked his attention. But I also felt like there was something sick and wrong about it. Like it might make me sick later. I thought of my grandmother, my father’s mother. How when I used to visit her in Georgia she would always let me eat all the cookies and frozen egg rolls I wanted. ‘Go ahead, sweetheart, there’s more,’ she would say. And it seemed okay because she was a grown-up, and I wanted all the Chips Ahoy! cookies in the bag. But I always ended up feeling extremely sick afterward.”

Part of Accelerated Adolescence for Augusten is his toxic, illegal, and abusive relationship with Neil. With hindsight and as an adult, Augusten writes about this relationship knowing that he was naive and taken advantage of as a child. During his adolescence and relationship with Neil, Augusten has the inner sense that something about it is wrong but doesn’t pinpoint exactly what until years later. Augusten has an unhealthy dependence on Neil (and vice versa), and he compares this to eating too many sweets and becoming ill.

“I marveled at my mother’s view of her mental illness. To her, going psychotic was like going to an artist’s retreat.”

Dierdre’s mental health condition worsens as time passes and she falls deeper into the abusive treatment of Dr. Finch. When she has a psychotic episode, she becomes particularly narcissistic and confident, bragging about her talents as a writer and her oppression as a woman. Augusten feels like his mother views her mental health condition as a privilege because she can use it to say and do things that others wouldn’t be able to get away with.

“Natalie’s hand in mine was still the most powerful thing I felt with my body. If we fell, we would fall together.”

As Augusten and Natalie approach adulthood, they start to truly consider their futures and their potential. Natalie is certain that Augusten would make a great writer, and Augusten is certain that Natalie would do well at Smith College. They each encourage each other to put effort into life and help each other with the transition from adolescence to adulthood. One day, they visit Smith College campus and walk across the ledge under the waterfall there. Doing so is a freeing and emotional experience for them both and symbolizes their stepping across the threshold into adulthood.

“It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn’t have to actually face them. In many ways I felt I was living the life of a doctor in the ER. I was learning to block out all emotions in order to deal with the situation. Whether that situation involved a mother who was constantly having nervous breakdowns or the death of the family cat by laundry hamper.”

Augusten develops ways of coping with his life and the chaotic nature of the people in it. By the time he’s 16, Augusten has learned to shut his feelings down almost completely. As part of his Accelerated Adolescence, Augusten is forced to grow up quickly and cope with events and relationships that no child should have to endure. He can’t rely on his mother at all, and the family he’s living with is unpredictable and provides him with little guidance. Augusten is never taught how to properly handle his emotions and instead learns to bottle them up.

“It scared me that I had her eyes because I worried that it meant I had whatever else she had back there that made her believe she could not only speak to the dead, but smoke cigarettes in the bathroom with them.”

Throughout his childhood, Augusten admired his mother deeply and wanted to be just like her. As he enters adolescence and starts to see through the guise of childhood worship, he comes to view his mother for who she truly is. In doing so, he recognizes the possibility that he could end up with the same problems one day, either because of genetics (nature) or as a result of being raised by her (nurture). In either case, one of Augusten’s deepest fears is that he’s simply projecting The Illusion of “Normal” and is in reality just as ill as Dierdre.

“The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.”

As Augusten grows up, he comes to learn about The Illusion of “Normal” and how easy it is for any person to have a mental health condition. During his childhood and youth, he watches as his mother experiences episodes, and he’s abandoned by his father who has alcoholism. Then, he’s exposed to the Finches, who each have their own issues that go unaddressed or improperly treated. Augusten realizes that people like himself, his mother, and even Agnes, walk a thin line and that one significant event can push anyone over the edge.

“The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.”

Throughout his Accelerated Adolescence and time living with the Finches, Augusten has almost total freedom to do as he pleases. While this presents itself initially as a benefit, he eventually realizes that this type of freedom is its own type of prison. Not until Augusten nears adulthood does he finally understand the true level of importance of having adult guidance as a child. He always viewed himself as more mature and wise than others his age, not realizing that he was as naive and in need of direction as any other youth.

“Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.”

It’s May, and the Christmas tree is still up in the Finch household. As Augusten stares at the tree, he comes to see it as a symbol of the disarray in his life and his neglect of his own principles and future. Reflecting on the last few years, Augusten realizes that he had more dramatic and negative experiences than genuine, innocent, fun ones. He feels as if these moments define his life and that everything in between is just time spent waiting for another disaster.

“We’re running alright. Running with scissors.”

In this quote, Augusten illuminates the context of his book’s title. As he sits with Natalie in a lobster restaurant, they reflect on how they always seem to be chasing unknowns and running around blind. Augusten has learned to absorb and become part of the chaos in his life and describes this phenomenon by comparing his approach to life to running with scissors. He knows that he’s headed for disaster but goes forward anyway. Around this time Augusten finally starts to crave direction and purpose in his life.

“I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.”

Augusten’s mother reveals that she’s detaching from Dr. Finch. She explains that he has been overmedicating her and emotionally abusing her and that he even raped her at one point. Dierdre admits that she was too mentally absent to understand what was going on but that she finally realized Dr. Finch’s true nature. Augusten feels as if he has been lied to for years and can’t believe that he spent his adolescence under the care of someone who would do this to his mother. At the same time, Augusten is irate that his mother once again wants nothing to do with him and plans to disappear. This quote illustrates the themes of The Illusion of “Normal” and The Complex Nature of Family Relationships.