What can you say about a book whose high point is, very arguably, a sixteen-year-old girl's memorably vivid description of her yeast infection? Where do you even go with that?Īnd that, really, is the problem with "Running with Scissors". It'd probably be too weird to work as fiction, and I simply can't believe somebody tried to film this thing. Burroughs doesn't seem to be "crafting" these stories as much as reeling them off, and why not? His childhood and adolescence seem to have given him material that most memoir writers can only dream of. While you sometimes get the sense that authors in this genre "work through" their material in a sort of semi-therapeutic kind of way, I don't get the sense that any of that is going on here. And it's a tremendous little guilty pleasure. It might, however, be one of the weirdest non-stories ever committed to paper. What to make of this one? It's one of the best-selling and best-known works in the "midlife memoirs" category, but it's far from the best of them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |