InsideOut Interview: Augusten Burroughs

by Owen Lipstein March/April 2009



Augusten Burroughs has already lived many lives, and chronicled some of them, in his best-selling memoirs A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (St. Martin’s Press, 2008), Dry: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), and Running with Scissors (St. Martin’s Press, 2002). They are all darkly amusing and ruthlessly honest, simultaneously cinematic and immediately accessible—not at all different from sitting down with him in person, which we did recently at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.



Owen Lipstein: I’ve been listening to your books, and you seem to be really into recording them, which makes a huge difference to the listener. A lot of authors don’t read their own work. How do you feel about that?



Augusten Burroughs: It’ll probably come off the wrong way.



OL: Oh, it’s alright.



AB: When I was a kid, my mother used to drag me to lots of readings. And I was just tortured, because so many writers, they just can’t, they can’t f**king read—[and] they should shut up! If you can’t read, then don’t do it! Don’t read. I hate the sound of my own voice. But I feel like the only option when I record them—the secret—is to just lose yourself in it, and read it like you didn’t write it. You just have to really be in it. So, yeah. And with nonfiction, when it’s not me—I mean, as long as I’m still alive, it seems as long as I’m not just horrible at it—assuming I’m not—it seems like I should read it.



OL: I think so, too. No one else could read it as well. How do you describe to other people why you’re so successful?



AB: Oh, I have no idea about why that happens. I’ve been writing all my life. When I decided I’m gonna publish a book, that became my reason to live. Literally. And so, the book did get published. You know, it was bought; I was paid, like, $7,000 for it. It was published in paperback, and it was—that was the best. You know, five people bought it. But that was all I wanted. That was what I wanted, and that was all I wanted.
My editor sat me down after we had lunch, and she said, “I will always publish anything you write for the rest of your life. I don’t ever want you to worry about that. For the rest of your life, whatever you write, I will publish.” And I believed her. So, I just relaxed.



OL: Do you still believe her?



AB: Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, I was never in it for, like, success. I had been successful in advertising for years—since I was a teenager, 19. I’d made a lot of money. And at the end of it, I think I had $300 to my name, after making all that money—the things that mattered to me early on, in my 20s and 30s, I didn’t give a f**k about any more. All the stuff that seemed so important, like success, could not possibly have mattered less. And then one of the books became big, and I became a published writer. Yeah.
So I don’t know. I mean, who knows why anyone becomes successful? I don’t know. But it wasn’t the goal. And although I appreciate it, and it’s been great, because of all the different experiences I’ve had—it’s better to be successful than not—I feel lucky, in a way, that it happened when it did. I was born in ’65. And it came out in 2000 (Sellevision, St. Martin’s Griffin). My personality was formed. You know? I was talking about this to someone who is actually famous. And we were talking about how fame magnifies what’s there already. You know? And so I think that that’s exactly the case. I’ve become even weirder, and more, like—



OL: More loyal to your weirdness?



AB: Well, yeah. I’m even more of a recluse. Like, when I’m not out on a book tour, I’m not at the Waverly Inn—I’m in bed, covered in dog hair, on my laptop. Or trying to install the Linux file server next to the furnace. It’s weird.



OL: Do you think there are occupational hazards to early success?



AB: To early success? Oh, God, yeah. If I’d been successful when I was in my 20s, someone would have had to take me
behind the barn and shoot me in the head.



OL: You took the risk of writing about your experiences. And people smiled. Do you think it’s basically good that this has happened?



AB: Yeah. I think it’s good. I’ve met so many people—it’s been good for me. I’ll tell you the thing about it that’s most interesting to me. Back when I would think about being published, all I would imagine is a big stack of [my] books when I walked into a bookstore. So, when I did actually see them, I saw a stack. It wasn’t that big, but it was a little stack at a bookstore. And it’s great for the first four minutes, and then you never feel it again, ever. You can’t.
But the thing I never thought about, ever—it never even occurred to me; maybe it’s because of my alcoholic brain—is that there are actual people who read the books. Readers. I never imagined; it never occurred to me. I imagined, before I went on a book tour, I just imagined a line of people, none of whom had faces. And just signing my book—it was all about me and my signature. And—the experience is so intense. It’s amazing. And extraordinarily intense. Because it’s this weird, deep connection with the people who read your book. But it’s quick. But I can look at them, and I can be like, “Oh my God, they f**king know.” You know? And that made me more human. It made me a better person.



OL: You obviously write a lot of memoirs, and some fiction. Do the memoirs make you feel a little naked?



AB: No. That’s the thing. You’d think you would. You’d think you would. But you don’t. I did, at the very first book reading. But then you don’t. I never did again. And the reason is, because no matter what I’ve written, or how mortified by it I am, someone has come up to me and said, “Me too, me too.” And it’s happened over and over and over. So now I know. Now I know that all these people know some things, too.
Like, I used to go down to the South, on book tours, to Atlanta. I walked out, and I looked at the audience. And, you know, it’s a very well-dressed Southern crowd. These people are together, and have just as much hairspray as the women in the South. Everyone’s in suits, because they’re coming from work. And all I could think was, Man, these people don’t even know. They’d probably heard my name, [but] they have no idea why. This is just horrible.
And then I got through it, and did it. They were a great audience. And people came up to me, all these people came up to me. There were local celebrities—there was a senator there, there was a CNN news anchor. They would whisper, really quickly, some horrible, shocking thing. You know? Some, like, horror. Oh my God, just, you know—“Me too, me too,” you know? And I kind of realized that people have a lot in common.
When I traveled—I was on book tour during the last election, when the country was divided between red and blue. And, you know? I realized: There’s no difference. There’s nothing. New York is identical to Columbus, Ohio, except the clothes. And that’s something I never would have thought.



OL: What do you make of this sort of furious debate about memoir and fiction? In your mind, it’s evidently clear what the difference is.



AB: Now it is…



OL: Have you ever just thought, I’ll call it fiction? I don’t want to have to deal with all the crap?



AB: Oh, no, I would never do that. I would never do that. You know what? I feel like, if I wanted to write fiction—I would write fiction. I love fiction. Novels sell more than nonfiction. The numbers are higher. Memoirs get the bulk of publicity, because of all the scandals. But the numbers for fiction are higher. So I should write fiction. I should write novels. But I’ve wanted to write memoirs, and I keep writing them. And the more that I get it, the more tawdry it gets, the more I feel like I’m gonna keep doing it. Gotta keep doing it. Because, you know what? It’s—I think it’s important.
I know that when I’ve read memoirs—when you read something on the page that you yourself completely identify with, but you’ve never been able to express; you’ve never had the words, or maybe you’ve not even realized it until you read it—it’s a profound feeling, suddenly, of not being alone in the world. And I have felt that: both alone in the world completely, and I have felt from a book that feeling of connection. If I’m reading this book, there must be other people reading it. It’s a profound thing. So I think it serves a purpose. I think it actually serves almost a medicinal purpose. Aside from the—you know, the entertainment, or whatever.
I’ve never had to make it up. So I feel like, Well, when I run out of stories, I’ll start making it up. I’ll write novels. It’s a shame, I think, about some of the little scandals, like the gang girl—you know, raised in an L.A. gang—that kind of thing is desperately corrupt. Because that’s not memoir; that’s just trying to take advantage, and manipulating people. You know, that’s saying, I recognize that you, the reader, want memoir. So I, the author, want to manipulate you for cash, and write a sensation—and I don’t see the point of that.



OL: You’re very exposed out there. You put out your experience and you say, This happened to me. And when you become famous, you’re a target of sorts.



AB: Well, that happens. I mean, that part of it is always gonna happen. But the thing about it is. I don’t read things about me. How can I explain it? It’s like—I’m not famous, you know? Nothing’s changed at all; You can’t see fame when you have any of it. You can’t see it, unless you go out. It’s reflected back. You can see it when it’s reflected back on you. But when you’re alone, it doesn’t exist. And if it does exist, you’ve got a serious issue.



OL: What do you get from the process of writing about evidently painful experiences? For a listener, your recent book is deeply upsetting—



AB: Yeah.



OL: As opposed to your Dry book, which is also upsetting, but a different experience.

AB: I don’t know what I get out of it. I just know that, like, the Fat book, I just had to write it. And I didn’t want to, and I hated doing it. But for some reason, I had to. I had to. And I decided I was gonna publish it, because the writing is different from publishing. I don’t have to necessarily publish it.
But I decided to publish it, because I thought, You know, I cannot be the only one in the whole f**king world who had this kind of father. I cannot be. And probably 90 percent of the people will hate it. It will not be what they want to read. But for those people that know what I’m talking about, that have been there, it’s gonna be for them.
And that’s exactly what happened, you know? [One] thing I hadn’t anticipated was the wives. I had always imagined it would be the kids of these guys that would respond to the book. And it was the kids. But it was also the women married to these guys.
So, it’s the kind of thing where, if I don’t write—I just get lost. That’s why I write. I don’t know what I get out of any book, except clarity. There’s never closure or healing, not really. You only heal so much.



OL: When you give these readings, do you relive it all?



AB: No.



OL: You don’t? It’s over for you?



AB: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally.



OL: You seem completely comfortable in your own shoes, with all your faults and virtues, There’s a searing honesty about you: It’s like you’re peeling skin. And I find your character very likable. Do you like yourself better now that you’re older?



AB: Yeah.



OL: How so?



AB: I don’t buy myself anymore. I used to always buy myself—about everything. To the point where it just was ridiculous. When I stopped drinking, and I think after losing—in Dry, the character, the person, Pighead—something dropped away. Some part dropped away, and I just wanted the truth, and I didn’t care how awful it was, or how much it hurt. I just wanted the truth. It’s the only thing you can hang onto. It’s the only thing. It’s the only thing, to me, that is important. And I’ve always been like that, too, when I was a kid. I mean, I’m still like that.
The only thing I would do, if I couldn’t write—and I can’t do this, because I don’t have the methodology—but I would study cosmology. I’ve always wondered, What is this? What is it? And the fact that we don’t know drives me crazy.
There’s some comfort, I think, in the truth. Not some; there’s an enormous amount of comfort when you can land on something that’s true, even if it’s awful. Because then, at least you know. And you can—you can move on.