Running With Scissors
I picked up Running with Scissors for a dollar at the library the other day. I’d started making a habit of grabbing whatever caught my eye on those year-round sale shelves while visiting libraries with Sofi (paperbacks are $1, hardcovers $3). This one called out because I vaguely remembered enjoying the movie years ago, and I hadn’t been in much of a reading rhythm lately, so I’d hoped it would shake me loose. And it did, I finished it within a few weeks.
The book, like the movie, is a wild ride. Augusten Burroughs recounts his chaotic youth with biting humor and surreal clarity. It’s not a story I relate to in terms of the events themselves (thankfully), but there was something about the tone, his way of noticing, observing, documenting, that pulled me in.
One passage near the end stuck with me. It’s a moment between Augusten and his friend Natalie, sitting barefoot at a lobster shack, joking and dreaming about the future. Natalie tells him he’s a writer, even when he doubts it, because of the way he notices people, the way he imitates them perfectly, the scribbled notes he keeps without thinking they matter.
“Because you’ve always been a writer. For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve had that pointy nose of yours tucked into some notebook…”
That line hit. It reminded me of something that happened recently, when I did an imitation of a mutual friend from high school during a conversation, and my friend on the line cracked up and said, “You nailed it. I can see him saying that just that way.” That’s the kind of memory that sticks. That’s the kind of noticing that makes a writer, whether or not you call yourself one yet.
The movie version of Running with Scissors came out in 2006, directed by Ryan Murphy and starring Joseph Cross, Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood, and the always-excellent Brian Cox as Dr. Finch. Watching it back then, I appreciated the performances, especially Cox’s unsettlingly magnetic presence. But reading the book now, with a little more life behind me, gave me a different kind of clarity.
Natalie says:
“Don’t you ever just feel like we’re chasing something? Something bigger… like we’re running, running, running?”
“Yeah,” he replies. “We’re running alright. Running with scissors.”
I don’t know what it is exactly that I’ve been chasing all these years. But I know the feeling. The urgency. The scribbled notebooks. The need to turn noticing into something real. Maybe we’re all running with scissors. And maybe that’s just how the real story begins.