He admits to changing the names of the people he mentions, but it’s the attorneys at St. Martin’s Press who insisted on that. And he legally changed his own name to Augusten X. Burroughs at eighteen, when he left behind an abusive childhood in Western Massachusetts and reinvented himself as a successful copywriter for an advertising agency in San Francisco. He now lives in Western Massachusetts once again, but this time with his partner Dennis and their two French bulldogs, Bentley (who was profiled in Urban Dog magazine) and The Cow. They share a house afforded by the literary success Burroughs has enjoyed for the past several years--a success that stems from his ability to hone the material he mines from his past.

Burroughs’ bestselling memoir of 2002, Running with Scissors, details the bizarre, dysfunctional world the author grew up in. He describes his mother Deirdre--a pathological narcissist--as a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton and all the joie de vivre of a Sylvia Plath. Young Augusten once walked in on her and the local church lady in a compromising position, and Deirdre regularly shared violent outbursts with her live-in girlfriend, Dorothy. When Augusten was just 12, she turned his care over to an equally disturbed person--her psychiatrist, Dr. Finch--who ran a household that was just as turbulent.

The Finch family lived in needless squalor and the neglected children ate dog food, popped Valium and played with daddy’s electroshock machine. The doctor foretold the future in the shape of his own stool, which he regularly displayed for the rest of the family and interpreted in press releases.

The “unorthodox” doctor had a room in his office called "the masturbatorium" and looked favorably on all things sexual. He even condoned a two-year sexual relationship between 13-year-old Augusten and the 30-something pedophile who lived in the shed behind their house. (Dr. Finch was eventually stripped of his license for insurance fraud.)

When Augusten was just 13, Dr. Finch aided him in a sham suicide attempt as a scheme to drop out of junior high. That was the boy’s first taste of liquor, and he eventually drank enough to give himself alcohol poisoning. In his second memoir, Dry, Burroughs recounts his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction during his years working as a copywriter in New York City. “I would literally go into a business meeting in the same suit I'd just worn in the South Bronx with people smoking crack in the room,” he told The Washington Post in July 2002. He says he relapsed midway through writing the book but now maintains that his sobriety is “the only reason my life works.”

Burroughs tempered the madness surrounding him through writing, and in addition to Scissors and Dry, he has written a book of essays called Magical Thinking and a novel, Sellevision, which has been optioned for film.

A movie version of Scissors is currently in production, starring Anette Bening as Augusten’s mother and Joseph Fiennes as the man who preys on the young boy. Burroughs says he is working on a third memoir, this one dealing his relationship with his late father, a man who once put out a cigarette on the bridge of young Augusten’s nose.

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