Running with Scissors

Read the book that created a sensation around the world.

After nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list, Running with Scissors is soon to be a major motion picture, starring Annette Bening, Joseph Fiennes, Alec Baldwin and Gwyneth Paltrow.

When Augusten Burroughs was twelve, his mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to her psychiatrist, a man who might have benefited from a touch of therapy himself.

This is the story of the bizarre years he spent in the doctor’s dilapidated Victorian mansion, getting to know the pedophile inpatient who lived in the garden shed, eating Valium tablets like other kids eat lollies and resorting to the vintage electroshock therapy machine for fun if things got dull.

It was an outlaw childhood which makes for a maniacally funny and compelling read. Hilarious where it could be shattering, this book tells sordid truths no one wants to hear and leaves its reader gasping for the next chapter.