Running with Scissors

Alice says that you need more than tea at the end of a day. With a horse-laugh and a wink, and a feathering adjustment to some internal throttle to rest her wings, she then says with a grin that splits her face as wide as an open book that what you need is Scotch.

Alice is the bantam book-loving head of the bookstore at the Centerville Public Library on Cape Cod. At 76, Alice runs the couple of rooms down in the basement of the library with equal parts efficiency and unrestrained enthusiasm, keeping the till in a Glenfiddich tin on the little desk by the door. Blatant promotion, she calls it. At 76, she has stopped time as if on a page of one of the books she sorts. In her twenties she could have been a WAVE or a WAC, though WAC would have been the more fitting profession for Alice. She recalls a time when real living required a certain extra something from a person, whether that something was humor or tenderness or style and grace or a kind of bravery that could, if one wasn’t careful, lead to remorse and regret.

Books in the library bookstore are all donated, and hardbacks are sold for one dollar while paperbacks are fifty cents. Sue introduced me to Alice. Sue loves books and I love books, too. The thing is, we don’t have a lot of money for books. The thing is, Sue and I don’t have a lot of money period. So Sue and I go through the bookstore with a budget of say five dollars, totally up our choices, ruthlessly culling our pick. Wait, I have a copy of The Idiot, you can read mine, and look, the pages of this collection of Conrad’s short stories are printed in columns to save paper, should we get it? We do this while Alice yells across the way, wondering if we’ve read this or that. That day, The Idiot still made the cut, while Conrad’s gimmickry was left on the shelf.

She told us about Running with Scissors, the crazy, twisted memoir by Augusten Burroughs. It chronicles Burrough’s growing up gay with a bi-polar mother and living with her psychiatrist’s family to whom he was handed off while his mother’s life disintegrated. It is graphic and at times definitely X-rated. It is, in a word, hilarious and it took a different kind of bravery to write it. It wasn't written with the kind of bravery from Alice's time. It's the kind of bravery we have today, laced with irony and humor, a naked bravery devoid of compassion. Alice was mystified that a patron thought that it was depressing and couldn’t finish it. “What planet do you live on, lady?” she wondered.