Running With Scissors: A Memoir

Content Warning: This section features graphic depictions of sexual assault of a minor.

Sexuality is an important motif in Running with Scissors that serves as a characterization device while also acting as a catalyst for Augusten’s growth as he experiences adolescence. Augusten grows up in an unhappy home with parents who despise one another and aren’t romantically close. He doesn’t attend school often growing up, and when he does, he avoids his peers as much as possible. For these reasons, Augusten has little exposure to sexuality and romance as a child and has no point of reference when he’s thrust into the Finch home at age 12. When it was first published in 2002, Running with Scissors broke through conventions and societal norms surrounding sexuality by featuring a gay protagonist. While it wasn’t the first book to do this, it did so in an extremely blatant and honest way. Augusten is relatively casual about his own sexuality and notes that he always knew he was gay: “The fact that I was gay had never been a big deal to me—I’d known all my life” (69). It never presents as a problem in his life because of his lack of involvement in school and his mother’s casual attitude about it, so Augusten grew up without worrying about being gay. Instead, he enters adolescence confident in who he is but completely without experience or knowledge of what lies ahead.

Although Augusten regularly remarks on feeling much more mature than his age, this is a common feeling among teenagers and is more likely the result of unreliable narration and the narcissism of adolescence. As Augusten spends more time with the Finches, he’s introduced to their older, adopted brother Neil Bookman. Neil was a previous patient of Dr. Finch’s who was later adopted by him but then defected from the family because of its dysfunction. Neil is 33 when he meets 13-year-old Augusten, and Neil’s own dysfunction as a person becomes almost immediately clear. He seems abnormally friendly at first, and before long he sexually assaults Augusten, saying, “That’s what gay men do” (113). Augusten feels trapped and in pain because of the experience, but something about Neil makes Augusten want him around. Augusten relishes the compliments and attention he gets from Neil, and is too naive to fully understand the nature of the situation. The two develop an abusive and co-dependent relationship that lasts for a couple of years before Neil disappears, never to be heard from again. Augusten’s relationship with Neil forever changes him and serves as a reference point for what he knows to avoid in the future. Reflecting on this toxicity later in life, Augusten realizes that Neil’s attention and neediness were like a sickness:

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 (196-97).

Augusten’s mother experiences a sort of sexual awakening too after meeting Dr. Finch. On one of their early visits with him, Dr. Finch explains that he has a “Masturbatorium” that he uses in between patients. Dr. Finch soon shows that he has an obsession with sex: He has several mistresses and later assaults Dierdre while she’s in a poor state of mind. Dierdre divorces her husband and begins dating women instead, the first of whom is a minister’s wife. At one point, Augusten walks in on them engaged in oral sex, and Dierdre’s mother cites her fight against oppression as a woman as the reason for her newly developed casual attitude toward sex. Dierdre then meets Dorothy, an 18-year-old patient of Dr. Finch’s who becomes more like her pet than her partner. Dorothy does everything for Dierdre and defends her actions even at her worst. Ultimately, Augusten’s exposure to sexuality as a teen is awkward at best and harmful at worst, but he thinks that he developed a hardened skin after living his entire life in chaos and thus remains relatively unhindered by these experiences.