ATM: Running With Scissors

I was told to check out this book. I took the lazy way out as I was in the middle of three other books. The movie was very good but now I have to get the book....after I finish the next Dexter novel. (Guntarski)

Based on the memoir Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, the film is a semi-autobiographical account of Burroughs' childhood. His mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, an eccentric man with an eccentric family.

At the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself in Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family and befriending Neil Bookman, Finch's 33-year-old adopted son. The two soon begin an open and consensual sexual relationship.

The story is one of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull an electroshock-therapy machine could provide entertainment.

The film diverges from the book in several important respects. A key aspect of the book is the narrator's progress through adolescence, but the film has one actor, Joseph Cross (age 19), who plays the central role throughout most of the movie, including scenes where the character is age 12 or 13. The movie shies away from many of the sexual aspects of the book. The nature of Augusten's first sexual episode with Bookman is different (the film does not portray it as a rape as the book does), the nature of Augusten's discovery of his mother's lesbianism is changed (this is presented in the film as the discovery of her kissing her lover, but in the book he walks in on them engaged in cunnilingus), and the allegation of Dr. Finch's rape of Deirdre is transformed into an embezzlement of money. On balance this gives the movie more of a PG-13 feel than the book would seem to warrant and substantially alters the forces that shaped the writer. The character of Bookman also takes on a dangerous element in the film that he lacks in the book (at the end of the movie he is shown hovering over a sleeping Dr. Finch with a pair of scissors, but this does not occur in the book). Moreover, the film glosses over and/or distorts much of the book's philosophy. For example, the film has Augusten state that life is "just a series of surprises," whereas in the book he has a somewhat bleaker yet more comical tone: "Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity."

http://en.wikipedia.org