I read Augusten Burroughs’ RUNNING WITH SCISSORS last week. Or, should I say, I devoured it. Wickedly funny and intensely sad, this is a memoir that refuses to let you put it down. Anyone read it? Seen the movie? I’ve yet to see the movie, but now I want to. You know, so I can whine about how it fails in contrast.
I love funny writing, but the humor only carried me through the first half of the book. The “intensely sad” haunted me throughout the second half. Oh, the writing’s still funny in the second half, but the “intensely sad” lurks beneath, like a bog.
Then I visited AB’s website. Great site, by the way. While visiting the website, I found out that Mr. Burroughs’ new memoir, which focuses on his father, WOLF AT THE TABLE, comes out, like, tomorrow. Okay, so it might not seem “woo-woo” to you that I inadvertently read RUNNING days before WOLF’s release, but it did feel “woo-woo” to me. Then, linking from his site to a New York Times article, I learned that Augusten Burroughs changed his name. The article makes it sound like he actually changed his name and didn’t just take a pen name. But maybe I read it wrong. Still recovering from the Devil of all Head Colds.
At any rate, his birth surname is Robison. And his older brother with Asperger’s Syndrome described in RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is none other than John Elder Robison, who published his own memoir, about growing up with Asperger’s, in September 2007. It’s called LOOK ME IN THE EYE.
What’s my point, you ask? Just a bit more woo-woo. A (so far) unpublished (in novel form) writer I “know” (as in we’ve emailed each other privately every once in an indigo moon) from a Chick Lit writers listserv (that is now called Fiction That Sells, but that’s another story), named Kim Stagliano (gee, I hope someone out there can follow this sentence), just happens to be mother to three children with autism. Kim blogs about mothering kids with autism, she has an agent currently shopping a novel in which autism focuses hugely in the plot, and she contributes to The Huffington Post on the same subject. She knows and has met John Robison on several occasions. Now is there a weird sort of Six Degrees of Separation going on here? I know Kim. She knows John. John, I’m pretty sure, knows Augusten Burroughs. And Augusten Burroughs’ mother, as described in RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, reminds me a lot of Sylvia Plath (or, I should say, the Sylvia Plath I came to “know” through reading her published journals several years ago). I read Sylvia Plath’s THE BELL JAR when I was thirteen. That book belonged to Ma Mere, who recently returned from a winter in the sun, and one of the books she brought home for me to read was RUNNING WITH SCISSORS. A whole lot of co-inkidinks…a big bunch of woo-woo.
Do you have a literary woo-woo to share?