Running With Scissors (memoir) - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Running with Scissors covers the period of Burroughs's adolescent years, beginning at age 12 after a brief overview of his life as a child. Burroughs spends his early childhood in a clean and orderly home, obsessing over his clothes, hair, accessories, and having great potential, with his parents constantly fighting in the background.

When his parents separate and his mother begins to second-guess her sexuality, Burroughs is sent to live with his mother's psychiatrist, Dr. Finch. The doctor lives in a rundown Victorian house located in Northampton, Massachusetts. He lives with his wife as well as his biological and adopted children and some of his own patients, where rules are practically nonexistent and children of all ages do whatever they please, such as having sex, smoking cigarettes and cannabis, and rebelling against authority figures. For example, Dr. Finch feels that, at age 13, children should be in charge of their own lives. However, the dysfunctional issues that occur in the Finch family are outdone by the psychotic episodes frequently experienced by Burroughs's mother.

The Finch house is a parallel universe to the home he came from. It is filthy, with cockroaches roaming around the uncleaned dishes, Christmas trees left up until May, stairs that Burroughs is afraid to walk up because he thinks that they will collapse under him, and nothing off limits. Eventually, Dr. Finch comes to believe that God is communicating to him through his fecal matter. When Hope, Dr. Finch's second oldest daughter, believes her cat is dying, she keeps it in a laundry box for four days until it dies.

Burroughs's mother is shown as emotionally drained, excessive, self-centered, and ultimately incapable of being a parent. She has a lesbian relationship with a local minister's wife, which is revealed to a young Burroughs when he accidentally walks in on them while he skips school. When this relationship ends, Burroughs's mother starts another with a teenage and affluent African-American woman. This relationship is tumultuous and unstable. At one point, they have a mental patient named Cesar live at their house. He attempts to rape Burroughs while he's sleeping, but is unsuccessful (when this patient goes to live with the Finches later in the book, he pays one of the Finches' daughters for oral sex and then is forced from the home). His mother's biggest psychotic episode happens when she and Dorothy (her partner) move everything out of their house, and attack Burroughs when he tries to intervene. This later ends with a "road trip" and events leading to Burroughs's mother being restrained on a bed.

Burroughs tells Dr. Finch's adopted 33-year-old son, Neil Bookman, that he is gay. From the age of 13 to 15, Burroughs has an intense and open sexual relationship with Bookman, which begins when Bookman forces the young boy to perform oral sex on him. Neither his mother nor any member of the Finch family is bothered by their relationship. Burroughs begins to enjoy exacting power over Bookman by threatening to charge him with statutory rape. Bookman is obsessed with the young boy, even though Burroughs has problems with their relationship (going in phases of needing the affection of Bookman to wanting to humiliate or get away from him) which only infatuates Bookman more. Bookman eventually leaves Northampton and is never heard from again by Burroughs or the Finches, even after they try everything in their power to find him.

Burroughs forms a close relationship with Dr. Finch's daughter, Natalie, who is one year older than he is, even though at the beginning of the book, he dislikes her. They do everything together from finding jobs to running under a waterfall. They finally leave the Finch household together.

At the end of the book, when Burroughs is living in his own apartment with Natalie, he is asked to choose between his mother and Dr. Finch when she accuses the doctor of raping her. The relationship between his mother and the doctor had been turbulent ever since a scene at a motel, where Dr. Finch's abnormal therapy methods reached a point at which they could possibly be interpreted as sexual assault. He still considers Dr. Finch's family and his mother to be his family, and he cannot bring himself to choose sides, although he is fairly certain that Dr. Finch did rape his mother. The book ends with Burroughs leaving Massachusetts and moving to New York City.