52 Book Challenge - Week One - Book One: Running With Scissors

Allow me to begin by saying that the book reviewers who wrote on the back cover have some sick senses of humor. This is coming from someone with a pretty demented sense of humor. My favorite comment made by one of these illustrious readers is "Wickedly, ridiculously funny."

Now when I read this on the back (there is no plot synopsis) my thought was that I was in for a belly laugh at every page.

Think again.

Sorry for all you sickos out there but I did not find this book "funny" at all. I found it entertaining at some points, wacky, maybe a little crack of a smile during a humorous and unbelievable anecdote, but not "funny".

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Basic synopsis:

The narrator is a child born to an alcoholic father and a psychotic mother (literally). The father leaves the family. The mother meets  an equally crazy therapist / psychiatrist who claims he is "treating her". She is convinced that her son (the narrator) should go live with the therapist and his family part time. So the kid does. Mind you, I think this story takes place in the seventies where flop houses and free love were more socially acceptable.

The therapists' "family" is a mish mosh of biological relations and other patients who have come to live in the house. There is no control, the house is filthy, the kids are uneducated and crass. They actually all sound like a bunch of hoarders. In fact, the last hoarders episode I saw with all of the roaches reminded me of this family. So the kid is stuck going back and forth between living with a bunch of crazy hoarders to his insane mother who takes baths in glass.

In the midst of ALL of this he is also learning about his  budding homosexuality. How does he first discover he is really, definitely gay? By becoming engaged in a sexual relationship with one of the therapist's sons who just so happens to be over thirty. Our narrator is thirteen. Are you laughing yet?

So from here the story just follows all of the dysfunction this kid has to live through with his whack job mother and her lesbian affairs, his nutso siblings who aren't really his siblings, and his affair with a grown man. Eventually, in the end, the kid (who has grown to nearly college age) realizes that living in a house with no control makes it near impossible to get anywhere. He takes control of his own life and we are left with the knowledge he is going to go to New York and try to make something of himself.

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This is all supposedly a true story although some of the scenarios in it are truly unbelievable to me. Someone needs to verify these events because if that James Frey guy got in all sorts of trouble for saying he didn't take Novocaine during some dental work, then Mr. Burroughs and his unreal characters / situations need to be investigated.

All that being said, the book WAS entertaining and I WOULD read Dry which is the next book talking about the next phase of his messed up life.

I'd recommend Running With Scissors, I just wouldn't call it "funny".