Augusten Burroughs

Right now I’m not because the next book is going to be a half-length book of Christmas stories. For some reason Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. That’s actually corny and sentimental but every Christmas has just been a living nightmare. So I’m going to put them all together in a book called You Better Not Cry. Then I’m writing a memoir of my father so Possible Side Effects will be my last essay collection for a while.

No, these were original for the book though I did do a version of the cardiology story in Details Magazine.

They’re fun to write for one thing. But also I like short stories because you can dip into them wherever you want. You don’t necessarily have to read them in order. I like being able to have a forum to write about all my experiences without telling one huge, big involved story. This format of essay collections lets me tell story after story after story. I can talk about a horrible job that I had as a sail cutter making sails for yachts. Then I can leap backwards in time and talk about my funny grandmother down in Lawrenceville, Georgia when I learned about the tooth fairy. [laughs] But also, like I said, the next major book is going to be a memoir about my father and that’s a really, heavy, dark, intense memoir about our relationship. That is a really an intense thing to write and thereby to live with him again like that.

I totally think you’re right about that. You’re actually the first person to ever say that to me but I’ve often felt that. If I didn’t have this as my outlet I think bad things could have happened because I was just so completely removed from society and I was isolated and crazy angry. Writing really has socialized me but it’s also given me an outlet. I’ve been writing since I was a really little kid. Before I could write I would talk into a little tape recorder. It’s something that I’ve always done. I took really naturally to it. My mother definitely encouraged me to write by buying me a tape recorder and then telling me to write. But I took naturally to it. It’s almost like I knew this was medication for me. I write all the time, everyday, even stuff that’ll never get published. I just have to write. But it’s not like I have a disease where I have to write every five minutes,.

I’ll tell you a quick story. I told you how I liked Christmas and this last Christmas I wanted to get a tree because I haven’t had a tree since I was a kid. So I dragged [boyfriend] Dennis out and we got a tree. Then we went to Target and got decorations for it and we were up to like 2:30 in the morning. We went to bed and the next morning I came downstairs and the house that we built for two years together was flooded. I freaked out because this is my first home. So I called the flood people and then right away I was sitting there with sopping wet shaking hands, writing about it because I was like catatonic.

Sometimes it does. It definitely does when I’m writing about my father. I’m actually I’m able to see it clearly and understand what happened. Then I just get really angry or upset. It’s not uncommon for me to cry as I write stuff. That happens a lot. In fact there’s some things I won’t read out loud when I’m on tour because I’ll just end up bawling like a total wreck.

Yeah, it does. Just the act of writing does that because it’s through the writing of it that I understand better. It really helps you contain and it gives you a place to put it. When you give form to your unnamed anxiety it allows you to identify where it’s coming from and what the sources are, which definitely does lessen it. I’m not nearly as angst ridden or confused as I was when I was as a teenager and in my 20’s. I definitely have much better perspective in my life.

I’ll tell you another thing. I was out in Boston with my media escort which is a person that is with a book author on the book tour. In each city, a person called a media escort meets them at the airport and you spend however long you’re in that city with this media escort and they take you to the book singings, radio and the TV interviews. They’re like your chaperone. There was this one this woman in Boston who had her husband pick me up. The guy was probably in his late 60’s and he looks like John McCain. Real bright blue eyes, always smiling and his son was graduating from Boston Medical School. So we were at a college Barnes & Noble and we’re looking for someone in charge to see if they had stock they wanted me to sign. This guy catches a glance of the graduation robes and he asks about the robes the doctors will be wearing and they tell him “They’re down one floor.” Then we’re told, “Ok, everyone’s next door waiting for you.” He wanted to go look for his son’s robe but he’s with an author so obviously he’s got to go where I go. But I said, “Let’s go down and find the robe.” He was like, “Oh no, that’s ok.” But I could see that it wasn’t ok. So I was like, “Come on, let’s go.” So we went downstairs looking for the robe. The floor was closed off, so I just moved the Employees Only sign out of the way and we went looking for the robes. I could feel this dad’s excitement over his son and when he turned his back to me, tears burned in my eyes. I choked and I had to immediately stop myself because I very nearly burst into serious tears because I always see fathers and sons in TV and movies and I understand there are these relationships they have but I’ve never known what I was missing. It was like I have had black and white vision my whole life and people talk about color and I understand the concept but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Then for one instant I saw color and it was utterly overwhelming and devastating and that’s what it was like seeing and feeling this father’s love for his son.

No, I don’t regret anything. I tried to make things better. I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried in every aspect of my life. In fact, that’s the thing I think I’ve done my whole life. If you had to describe me in a sentence it would be that I always try to make things better even if it seems absolutely crazy and delusional. But there are times when it just doesn’t matter. It’s just something not going to be good and there is nothing you can do about it.

People know that they know everything about me and I don’t know anything about them so they break the ice. People are aware of that imbalance and they make it not awkward. It could be really awkward and weird but it’s not because people are very open with me. It’s counterintuitive because it does seem like it would be horrible having all these people know. But it’s really not. At one point when Running with Scissors came out, I went to do a reading in LA and I was just about to go on and I freaked out because I thought, “Oh my God, I’m too exposed.” But the people were so receptive and warm and they shared so much of themselves with me that that feeling left and never came back.

Yeah. Wherever I go I meet people who have gone through the same things I have or they can totally relate to the emotions. It’s really fascinating to me that it is people from all walks of life. I’ve had Republican senators come up to me, judges, movie stars, homeless people, soccer moms, teenagers and they all can relate to something. Whether they felt abandoned as kids or whether they were molested or know someone who was an alcoholic or suffered with alcoholism themselves or felt like they were on the outside looking in all their lives or had secrets they didn’t ever want to tell. That made me feel good because I realized the world’s not filled with people who have perfect lives and did everything right.

Yeah, that’s going to be huge. That could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on if the movie’s good. But I’ve seen the movie and it is not only good but it’s spectacular. I was absolutely blown away by it. So I’m really proud of it even though I didn’t direct it or write the screenplay. [writer/director] Ryan Murphy took such incredible care of everything. He was just really protective of it because he really wanted it to maintain the spirit of the book and he did. It was surreal watching it. It was like a home movie where everyone is much better looking than you remember. But I was also able to step back and be like “Fuck, this is going to be huge and really hit a nerve with people.” It doesn’t feel like an American film because it doesn’t feel like something that made it through Hollywood. I can’t think of another movie I can compare it to. The performances are fucking amazing. Evan Rachel Wood, who I love her anyway, is so good in this. She’s like a little Meryl Streep. You’ve never seen Alec Baldwin like this. He’s just a man ruined. It’s painful to watch him. Annette Bening plays my mother. In Hollywood, people who are mentally ill are always the same way with screaming, yelling and histrionics. Real psychosis is in the eyes and that’s what Annette Bening nailed. She genuinely looked psychotic. It’s very authentic. They’re not only great performers, but they’re not doing this because they’re going to rake home a $50 million paycheck. They did it because they wanted to.

I didn’t give a fuck. That would have made no difference to me at all. Originally I was not going to option Running with Scissors because I thought it was too easy to make some campy, tawdry tacky movie out of the book. Ryan was very persistent and I finally decided to meet him just to give him the respect of explaining why I’m not going to option this to anybody, even to someone as tenacious as him. We spent the whole lunch discussing his mom and his mother was so similar to my mother and he had a real understanding of Running with Scissors. I had a real 180 degree turn and by the end of lunch I knew he would make the movie. The fact that he was gay had nothing to do with it. I’m not proud of being gay in the same way that I’m not proud of being right handed. I didn’t go through the American or any school system so I wasn’t raised with any religion. I used to get Jesus and Santa confused constantly. I wasn’t indoctrinated with the belief that being gay is bad. That was not something I ever had to fight against anything, I never had to like, I just never thought about it. The fact that the person I spend my life with has hairy arms is nothing. So the sexual orientation of the director would not have made a difference, it just turned out he was.

Before I published my first novel I would write about events in my life in stories and essays. They weren’t as well articulated because I had a lot of anxiety, so a lot of them were like, “Fuck, I’m so fucking upset. What am I going to fucking do?” A lot of anxiety and confusion. Though some of them were more articulate.

Well my book Dry was based on my journal. I started writing it the day I got out of rehab. The final book was basically an edit, with the exception of the first two chapters, which I wrote later to set it up. But the rest of it was an edit from the 1800 pages of journal that I had. I tried to collect the best of the best so that it told the story. That’s an example of that. So if I had a date or conversation with somebody, 15 minutes later I was upstairs in my crummy little apartment writing about it. There’s a scene where I’m relapsing and I’m sitting at the computer writing, that part was literally copied and pasted from the original diary into the final word document. Not one change. If I went down for cigarettes; I would spend the next hour upstairs writing and overanalyzing it. Writing Dry was what kept me sober. It was like creating my own road map.

That whole drama started because of a Page Six thing. All my books have had disclaimers and they’re all specific to each book. For Dry, I worked at like ten different ad agencies and that would have been really confusing in a book because I would have been introducing new people all the time. Also people would have wondered if my constant job changing was a result of my alcoholism. But that’s not the case in advertising. People change jobs constantly in advertising for dozens of reasons so it is the most normal thing in the world. So I merged some ad people together and I made it read and feel like I was at one place. That made it much easier. So the disclaimer is not some new thing that’s happened because of the [James] Frey thing, it’s always been like that.

I don’t know what it’s going to do. It hasn’t changed the way I write. I tend to think of it more as just something that’s more of an aberration that occurred and went away. It’s lonely to write and your chances of being published are slim enough as it is. I just can’t imagine that the majority of writers out there are going to play games with that. I think most people who write would take it seriously and honor it and know the fucking difference between something that’s true and something that’s just completely made up. I can’t imagine that it is going to come out that a zillion writers have lied. I don’t think its going to affect things that much, but who the fuck knows? It didn’t stop Frey’s sales. That’s the really weird part. But then again look at that girl who was plagiarizing. It does seem that right now odd things are happening in the literary world.

Yeah and you just haven’t seen it.

I have to get working on that but I know it is going to be an hour long weekly show. I haven’t started writing the actual script yet, right now I’m writing the bible for it. It’s definitely going to be fun. It’s a totally new form for me. I think that I haven’t done it before. They’re just waiting for me to get my fucking ass working on it.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck