Burroughs, Augusten 1965–

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Burroughs, Augusten 1965–

PERSONAL:

Original name, Christopher Robison; name legally changed, c. 1983; born October 23, 1965, in Pittsburgh, PA; son of John (a professor) and Margaret Robison; partner of Dennis Pilsits (a graphic designer).

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY; western MA. Agent—Christopher Schelling, Ralph M. Vicinanza Ltd., 303 W. 18th St., New York, NY 10011. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

During early career, worked as a copywriter, dog trainer, store clerk, waiter, and store detective; radio commentator, National Public Radio, 2003—.

WRITINGS:

Sellevision (novel), St. Martin's Griffin (New York, NY), 2000.

Running with Scissors: A Memoir, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Dry: A Memoir, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Magical Thinking: True Stories, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Possible Side Effects (memoir), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Details.

ADAPTATIONS:

Running with Scissors was adapted for audio, read by the author, Audio Renaissance, 2003; the book was also adapted for a film directed by Ryan Murphy and produced by Brad Pitt, Sony Miramax, 2006; Sellevision is also being adapted for a feature film. Other memoirs from Burroughs have been adapted for audio.

SIDELIGHTS:

Augusten Burroughs's first book is the campy novel Sellevision, which is set in the world of home-shopping networks. In the story, on-air personal- ity Max exposes himself while promoting toys, is fired, and finds a new career in adult pornography. The prim and proper Peggy Jean Smythe, who pushes Princess Di memorabilia, takes fan criticism to heart and finds refuge in drugs and drinking, oblivious to the fact that her husband is seducing the girl next door. When Peggy goes into rehab, two replacements, one of whom is the executive producer's mistress, are stalked via e-mail. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that "this kaleidoscope of gleefully salacious intrigue aims to titillate and amuse in a purposefully over-the-top way." Booklist reviewer James Klise concluded that "the material sparkles, just like the Diamonelle earrings on the shopping channels."

Based on his childhood diaries, Burroughs's Running with Scissors: A Memoir was twenty years in the writing and a lifetime in the making. Although Burroughs has changed the names of his characters, he avows that this is his life story, beginning when he was an adolescent in the 1970s. Entertainment Weekly contributor Karen Valby wrote that Burroughs "wins the year's Best Scene Opener award with this dandy: ‘We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover.’"

Burroughs describes his father as an emotionally distant and alcoholic professor and his mother as a manic depressive confessional poet. After they divorced, his mother pursued constantly in therapy with Rodolph Harvey Turcotte (Dr. Finch in the book). Finch's household includes his hunchback wife, Agnes, their six children, and an assortment of live-in patients, all of whom share a filthy pink Victorian mansion in Northampton, Massachusetts. Finch's unorthodox practice includes maintaining a "masturbatorium" in his office and reading the future in his patients' feces. Burroughs's mother never improves under Finch, and after coming out as a lesbian and moving in with her teenaged lover, she signs her son over to the psychiatrist, who accepts guardianship. Burroughs, like the Finch children, receives no adult guidance. He befriends Hope and Natalie Finch, with whom he has substance abuse and delinquency in common. A Kirkus Review contributor noted that Burroughs "strongly delineates the tangled, perverse bonds among these high-watt eccentrics and his childhood self, aspiring to a grotesque comic merger of John Waters and David Sedaris."

With the help of Finch, Burroughs fakes a suicide attempt to get out of school. Neil Bookman, a man in his thirties and the "adopted son" of Finch, molests Burroughs with Finch's approval. Thomas Haley wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that "this association overshadows most other events in Burroughs's book, not only because it is potentially the most harmful, but because it so clearly exemplifies Augusten's perpetual victimization by those older and supposedly more mature than him." Haley concluded by saying that Burroughs's memoir "is too brutal and disturbing, despite the frequent laughs, to be read as an inspirational or life-affirming memoir. But Running with Scissors is nonetheless a stirring and stunning testament to a boy's strength in an environment of unfathomable heartache and dysfunction." Scott Tobias wrote for the Onion A.V. Club online that "the sole comfort of reading this profoundly disturbing memoir, outside of Burroughs's brave comic perspective, lies in knowing that he lived to write it."

As he grew up, Burroughs distanced himself from his mother, came out as being gay, left Finch at age seventeen, earned his GED, and became a copywriter. His abuse of alcohol and drugs led him into rehab at age thirty. His only connection to his own family was his older brother, John, who had not been subject to the life Burroughs experienced in the Finch household. Virginia Heffernan, who reviewed the memoir in the New York Times Book Review, wrote that it "promotes visceral responses (of laughter, wincing, retching) on nearly every page" and "contains the kind of scenes that are often called harrowing but which are also plainly funny and rich with child's-eye details of adults who have gone off the rails." Galina Espinoza noted in a People review that many of the characters in Burroughs's life acknowledge the truth of parts of the memoir but deny others. His father declined to comment. His parents were both in their late sixties when the book was published, and his mother was confined to a wheelchair after a stroke in 1989. Turcotte lost his medical license in 1986 and died in 2000. In 2005, the Turcotte family sued Burroughs for defamation, claiming that many incidents in his book were fictional. Lambda Book Report contributor Seth J. Bookey wrote that Running with Scissors "does a beautiful job of reflecting on the bizarre without fetishizing or sentimentalizing it, or being victimized by it. Distance, via time, allows Burroughs to laugh at it all, but underneath all the kitsch (and filth), this memoir perfectly captures how an adult generation abdicated all authority. The only thing more fascinating than Augusten's neglect going unnoticed by anyone who could have helped is that he had the self-determination not to get stuck in the quicksand of his elders."

The sequel to Running with Scissors is Dry: A Memoir. Also written in memoir format, Dry focuses on Bur- roughs's descent into and struggles with alcoholism. This section of the memoir begins with the protagonist as a nineteen-year-old with only an elementary school education and a long legacy of troubles stemming from his insane mother, his alcoholic father, and the psychiatrist who raised him. He finds his only escape in drink and fills twenty-seven garbage bags with empty liquor bottles. His employer, concerned for his health, has him sent away for a month of rehab; naturally, more wild adventures and fantasies ensue. "With irreverent and humorous touches, Burroughs manages to personalize the difficulties of recovery without ever lapsing into sentimentality," reported Nancy R. Ives in Library Journal. Dry is considered by many reviewers to be a deeper story than Burroughs's previous memoir, providing readers with more insight into his personality. The main character is "less the walking quirk this time and more just a brave, funny, unhappy human being," wrote Lev Grossman in Time. Other reviewers preferred Burrough's more bombastic prior works and see too many indications of authorial self-indulgence in Dry. Book contributor Steve Wilson, for example, felt that while the story analyzes Burroughs's recovery from alcohol addiction, "his new addiction is memoir writing, and that he may well have overdosed on it after only two books." Wilson added that Dry is overfull of introspection, to the point of making its characters sound like the teen stars of Dawson's Creek."

Following Dry, Burroughs released Magical Thinking: True Stories, a collection of colorful, sometimes shocking, stories full of delicious details and self-deprecating humor. The term "magical thinking" describes Burroughs's belief that people can influence the world around them simply with their thoughts. Among the many stories included in this collection are "My Last First Date," in which Burroughs discusses the first time he met his current boyfriend, and "Telemarketing Revenge," which Allison Block described in Booklist as "a raunchy solution for relentless nocturnal callers." Other stories relate Burroughs's anguish over killing a mouse in his bathtub, his legal run-in with a cleaning lady, his wish for his boss's horrific demise, and numerous other tales from his strange and interesting life. Like Running with Scissors and Dry, Magical Thinking "showcases Burroughs's sharp, funny and sometimes brilliant writing," according to a critic for Publishers Weekly. The reviewer compared Burroughs to essayists David Sedaris and David Rakoff, but observed that he is very much an individual: "Burroughs ambles toward insight in a continual state of self-examination and just happens to have peculiar adventures along the way." In her review for Booklist, Block averred that Magical Thinking "offers an irresistible display of sanity hanging by a thread."

Burroughs provides twenty-six further vignettes to his memoirs in his 2006 essay collection, Possible Side Effects, which traces aspects of his life before and after becoming a well-known author. Here the author describes incidents ranging from his childhood fear of the tooth fairy to misadventures with his French bulldog, Cow. A nosebleed on an overnight flight to London finds him skulking away to the toilet lest he be confused for a terrorist; his passion for John Updike first editions is also explored. In light of the defamation suit filed against him for Running with Scissors, as well as the scandal surrounding the pseudo-memoir A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey, Burroughs was careful to append a caution at the beginning of these essays that some of the real life incidents had been "expanded and changed." Booklist contributor Brad Hooper felt the book is an example of "irreverence done to an amusing turn," while a reviewer for Publishers Weekly commented that Burroughs's "self-involvement can get claustrophobic, but when he steps outside his head no one is funnier or more perceptive." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Tara McKelvey concluded: "Unflinchingly, [Burroughs] gouges himself (literally and figuratively), bleeds, gets it on paper … and then makes you laugh. Now that's genius."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Burroughs, Augusten, Running with Scissors: A Memoir, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Burroughs, Augusten, Dry: A Memoir, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Burroughs, Augusten, Magical Thinking: True Stories, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Burroughs, Augusten, Possible Side Effects, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2006.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, September 14, 2004, "Through a Joke, Darkly," review of Magical Thinking, p. 80; June 6, 2006, Regina Marler, review of Possible Side Effects, p. 44.

Book, July-August, 2003, Steve Wilson, review of Dry, p. 77.

Booklist, August, 2000, James Klise, review of Sellevision, p. 2109; July 2004, Allison Block, review of Magical Thinking, p. 1795; April 1, 2006 Brad Hooper, review of Possible Side Effects, p. 4.

Boston Globe, October 18, 2006, David Mehegan, "Family Settles with Sony over ‘Scissors.’"

Entertainment Weekly, June 28, 2002, Karen Valby, review of Running with Scissors, p. 136; December 26, 2003, review of Dry, p. 83; May 12, 2006, Nicholas Fonseca, review of Possible Side Effects, p. 85.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2000, review of Sellevision, pp. 977-978; May 15, 2002, review of Running with Scissors, p. 714; April 15, 2003, review of Dry, p. 581; July 1, 2004, review of Magical Thinking, p. 612; February 15, 2006, review of Possible Side Effects; March 1, 2006, review of Possible Side Effects, p. 217.

Lambda Book Report, September, 2002, Seth J. Bookey, review of Running with Scissors, p. 14; November-December, 2004, Owen Keehnen, True Confessions, p. 43.

Library Journal, June 1, 2002, Nancy R. Ives, review of Running with Scissors, p. 162; July, 2003, Nancy R. Ives, review of Dry, p. 95; April 15, 2006, Sue McClellan, review of Possible Side Effects, p. 75.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 22, 2002, Merle Rubin, review of Running with Scissors, p. E3.

New Statesman, January 22, 2007, Rachel Cooke, review of Possible Side Effects, p. 56.

New York Times, June 20, 2002, Janet Maslin, review of Running with Scissors, p. B9.

New York Times Book Review, July 14, 2002, Virginia Heffernan, review of Running with Scissors, p. 7; October 10, 2004, John Leland, "Running to Home Depot," review of Magical Thinking, p. 12; July 16, 2006, Tara McKelvey, review of Possible Side Effects; November 26, 2006, Dwight Garner, review of Possible Side Effects, p. 22.

O, the Oprah Magazine, May, 2006, Cathleen Medwick, "Bad Boy," review of Possible Side Effects, p. 212.

People, September 23, 2002, Galina Espinoza, review of Running with Scissors, p. 229.

Publishers Weekly, July 31, 2000, review of Sellevision, p. 69; June 3, 2002, review of Running with Scissors, p. 77; April 21, 2003, review of Dry, p. 48; July 12, 2004, review of Magical Thinking, p. 50; May 23, 2005, Jason Anthony, "Authors Craving Some of That Hollywood Movie Money before Actually Doing What They're Paid to Do—Write Books—Have Two Choices," p. 10; February 20, 2006, review of Possible Side Effects, p. 143.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), August 11, 2002, Thomas Haley, review of Running with Scissors.

Time, May 26, 2003, Lev Grossman, "Drinking out Loud," review of Dry, p. 77.

Vanity Fair, January, 2007, Buzz Bissinger, "Scandal: Ruthless with Scissors."

Writer, May, 2005, "Augusten Burroughs," p. 66.