'Running With Scissors' is the kind of book you covertly thrust into the hands of people you know can handle it - friends who enjoyed John Waters's early oeuvre or are conversant in the freakish people unfazed by life's scatological, evil underside. 'I always win the -up-childhood contest,' Burroughs says, 'no matter who's in the room.' Sedaris is a finer prose stylist and funnyman, but young Augusten has much more material to work with. 'Running With Scissors,' released this month to uncommonly effusive critical huzzahs, praising both its brutality and humor, has just jumped onto the New York Times bestseller list, and the words 'David Sedaris' are being bandied about by comparison.īurroughs's material makes that writer's tics and wacky affectations seem quaint and normal. 'A bus,' he says, 'will either hit you, or it'll have your face plastered in an ad on the side of it.' He tells funny jokes, and can't say enough good things about his boyfriend.Īugusten Burroughs seems bulletproof to his past, unfazed by what may come. He wears frayed cargo pants, a lawn-green shirt, New Balance running shoes and a Yankees ball cap. Yet all the notes from our lunch on a muggy, Upper West Side Tuesday afternoon indicate that the subject turned out to be a cheerful, chatty, well-adjusted, 36-year-old man who walks with an optimistic, boyish gait. You want the kind of boy who, specifically, according to his life story 'Running With Scissors,' was thrown into a loony, adopted Massachusetts family that okayed pill-popping, kept the Christmas tree up until May, looked approvingly on sex between grown-ups and minors, lived comfortably with filth, and divined their twisted fates by the shape of things in Dad's toilet bowl. You want him to be curt, sardonic, reflectively embittered. Burroughs (a name he picked for himself at 18 and legalized in a Boston courtroom) doesn't look even a teeny bit afflicted.

Neil bookman running with scissors