At advance screenings around the country, audience reaction to the movie "Running With Scissors" has been almost uniformly the same.

"People sit there watching the credits in stunned silence," says Augusten Burroughs, author of the best-selling memoir that spawned the TriStar film.

Good stunned silence?

"I hope so," Burroughs says, laughing.

The film opens nationwide today, with a broad publicity push and a high-profile cast that includes Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Evan Rachel Wood and Jill Clayburgh.

It's a film that was never supposed to be.

Already an established novelist, Burroughs wrote "Running with Scissors" as a way to confront — and, he hoped, divest himself of — an unspeakably (though, fortunately, not unwritably) disturbing childhood that included abandonment by his ambitious but delusional mother, subsequent adoption into the bizarre household of his mother's psychiatrist and a sexual awakening with a pedophiliac 35-year-old man.

Not exactly Dan Brown stuff.

"It was obvious it wasn't going to sell," Burroughs says. ... "I thought it would sell five copies in San Francisco, maybe eight in New York. I loved it as an artifact, and I figured I'd give it to my nephew as a piece of family history."

And this is why Burroughs is a best-selling author and not a literary agent. The book has sold nearly a million copies since its release in 2002 and has spent the last 114 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list. This week, it's back in the No. 1 spot.

Carefully juggling the humorous and the grotesque, the tragic and the inspirational, "Running with Scissors" has been compared favorably to the best works of David Sedaris, Frank McCourt and other memoir writers.

It wasn't long before movie directors and producers started calling.

"There was this burst of interest from Hollywood, but I was very adamant that I was not going to option it," Burroughs says. "I thought it would be very easy to make a bad movie out of it and very hard to make a good one. They could take the sensational aspects of it and make what would essentially be a parody, or they could take out all the disturbing aspects and make it unrecognizable."

But director Ryan Murphy ("Nip/Tuck") persisted where others gave up, and Burroughs agreed to meet him "to tell why I wasn't going to do it."

The two met for lunch at a New York restaurant, and Murphy disarmed the skeptical Burroughs by sharing stories of his own unusual childhood.

"I had an instinct about him, and instinct is really the only thing I've ever had," Burroughs says. "I gave him the book because he really understood it.

"He never looked at it as a train wreck."

Murphy wrote the screenplay, eliminating a few characters to streamline the story and identifying a unifying theme of survival to give the story shape for the screen. But casting would be critical.

Murphy auditioned some 400 young actors for the Burroughs role before deciding on Joseph Cross, the only actor who made him cry.

For Burroughs, it was an ideal match, from the almost prissy politeness they have in common to their shared sense of calm in the face of adversity.

Cross "has an unflappable quality to his personality," Burroughs says. "If you poured water down his shirt, he wouldn't flinch.

"What he brought was the ability to communicate a huge range of emotions with his eyes. Growing up, I felt I could deal with extraordinary stress. A person can shut down and look calm, but you can still see emotion burning in their eyes."

The portrayal of Deirdre Burroughs was a touchy subject. In real life, Burroughs' mother suffered from bipolar disorder and delusions of grandeur, fancying herself a great Southern poet, denied her destiny by her marriage and her children.

Carried along by the self-actualization craze of the 1970s, she abandoned her 13-year-old son (and an older brother who is not portrayed in the movie) to pursue her craft.

To avoid simple stereotypes, Murphy insisted — and Burroughs agreed — that none of the characters would be depicted as purely good or purely evil. The film aimed to acknowledge the complexity of each character's life, thereby allowing for audience sympathy if not necessarily agreement.

Annette Bening's portrayal of Deirdre does just that, Burroughs says.

"In Hollywood, mental illness is always portrayed with great histrionics that are just begging for the Oscar," Burroughs says. "But when you are truly ill, it's in the eyes, the way they drift and don't recognize their surroundings. (Bening) does that. What she did is psychologically accurate, and it's something we've never seen in the movies before. She's incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable."

Burroughs says he has not spoken to his mother in years, despite a steady flow of e-mail from her. When the book was first released, Deirdre, still delusional, asked him: "What will I tell my press?"

She sent a lengthy fax to The New York Times.

While some may find the book and the film disturbing, even bizarre, in its particulars, Burroughs says his story is far from tragic. It is, ultimately, a story of how to survive.

"I've never been someone to blame the world," Burroughs says. "I don't feel the world owes me anything, because I grew up never expecting even the basic essentials of life.

"I focused on humor and absurdity rather than the catastrophic reality, which was too hopeless and horrible."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.