Interview with Augusten Burroughs

When you hear the name Augusten Burroughs, you might think of a damaged gay guy with an incredibly screwed-up childhood who helped exorcise his demons by writing sardonic, heart-wrenching memoirs.

Running With Scissors, which chronicled Augusten's distress after his mother pawned him off to live with a deranged psychiatrist, was on the New York Times bestseller list for seventy weeks. The follow-up, Dry, recalled his battles with alcohol and a merciless advertising job. Then came Magical Thinking, a collection of personal essays that revealed his triumph over the trauma.

Yet Augusten is more than a mere survivor. He's an ingenious, hyper-creative force on the verge of something huge—a mega-mogul in the making.

Just last week, the literary impresario's latest volume of sharply observed, snarky essays, Possible Side Effects landed in bookstores to wide acclaim. He's creating an hour-long original comedy series for Showtime. His only novel, Sellevision, a zany, behind-the-sets spoof of a scandalous home-shopping network, is being developed into a film starring Kristin Davis and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. A stocking-ready collection of fractured holiday tales is also in the works.

And in perhaps the biggest coup of all, Sony Pictures has fashioned Running With Scissors into a movie boasting a dream cast that includes Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jill Clayburgh, and Joseph Fiennes. Written and directed by Ryan Murphy (the writer/director of the FX Network's Nip/Tuck), the film's release was shifted to October 2006 to nab a strategic berth for Oscar contention.

The irrepressible scribe, who now lives a veritable Ozzie-and-Harriet existence with his partner, Dennis, and two French Bulldogs in a country house they built in New England, still keeps a pied-à-terre in Manhattan where he lived for years.

Augusten took time out from his 20-city book tour to discuss his burgeoning body of work, and what makes him—to borrow a slogan from the wacked-out world of advertising he has now shunned—“take a licking and keep on ticking.”

AfterElton: What's your take on your success, given your, um, unusual upbringing?
Augusten Burroughs: It's completely surreal. And it's compounded by the fact that I'm living in the area where I grew up, Amherst, Massachusetts, where Running with Scissors takes place. But now I have an entirely different life and worldview with all this experience behind me. It's actually very nice, and keeps me grounded. I definitely had a strong sense of self before I achieved this kind of success. Otherwise I honestly would have been a mess—hanging on every review and attending every premiere and really just working it. I've backed off from all that.

AE: How's the book tour going?
AB: My feelings are mixed. I have a bad back, so travel is really hard. On a book tour, you're up at 4 am to catch the first flight out to whatever city. You land, do the media in a city, radio, TV, print, whatever—a full day of interviews. At the end of the day, there's a reading. That's when I get to meet the people who actually read my books—it's absolutely re-energizing. Then I return to the hotel around 10:30 and order room service. Or if they don't have it at that hour, I grab dinner from a vending machine.

AE: So your fans make it all worthwhile?
AB: People invigorate me. I have this incredibly privileged vantage point traveling around the country to all the red states and the blue states and pink states and the crazy Christian states. I've met all those people and they're great. You know, people have more in common than they realize—especially coming from New York where the rest of the country seems terrifying.