My thighs ache from expanding for the Indian food wolfed down at yet another family dinner last night. Sadly, I didn’t win any of the rounds of the annual UNO championship, despite valiant attempts to thwart the dread Attack machine. We did play until Littlest Niece won a game, thus allowing her parents a good night’s rest by not wondering if their daughter carried her loss around in the pit of her stomach. It may be a silly card game to you; for our family, it’s a Thanksgiving tradition ripe with the wisdom of Cold War strategy. What is a family after all without its strange rites and quirks?
What is family anyway? Zipping through Running With Scissors a second time, hilarious and roaringly funny were definitely not the emotions evoked by Augusten Burroughs’ memoir of a “different” childhood. No matter the number of reads or varying mindset, I just do not find dysfunction, especially that of the familial variety, humorous in any way. Of course, I slap those same food-filled thighs and laugh until my jaws hurt at my own past’s dynamics, but it’s easy to laugh at the past, your own history, from the safe vantage point of having survived it intact. Defense mechanisms and world outlooks gleaned from any sort of childhood, traumatic or idyllic, are not ticklish anecdotes, when merging with the book and its characters. Both reads rendered me a numb observer, not unlike how Burroughs often adjusted to his own upbringing.
Coincidentally, my cousins brought up the topic of memoirs at last night’s dinner. Through heaping spoonfuls of paneer, rasam and bondas, we discussed the Nobel Peace Prize given to Rigoberta Menchú, author of an autobiography considered fraudulent by some. How accountable should authors be held for their personal stories? What do we deem autobiographically acceptable – name changes to protect the guilty, embellishments, borrowed anecdotes, flights of fancy or outright lies? Where is that line drawn? A prize should not be taken away from a woman who created awareness and evoked feelings of sympathy and goodwill towards her people, even if the story wasn’t her own. She told someone’s story, probaly one that person will never have the talent or opportunity to write.
More to come on this topic just as soon as I get Alexis to read the book(s) and enter bilateral discussions with this Mistress of Perspective.
I thought Running With Scissors had funny moments, but it didn’t strike me as a book that was intending to be funny. I read it after I read Dry which may explain my reaction. Dry was absolutely harrowing and seems clearly grounded in reality rather than exaggeration, when compared to my own experiences.