Shopping For Memories

[May 24th, 2006] There are two Augusten Burroughses. That's what the memoirist told me last week.

"There's my normal life. I write about it," says Burroughs, whose tales of surviving his fucked-up family are the stuff of bestsellers. "But then I go on book tours, and that's a whole different thing."

I got to see both sides of the 41-year-old, who was in town to read from his latest confessional, Possible Side Effects (St. Martins Press, 291 pages, $23.95). I invited him to Pioneer Place for a little mall-walking and -talking. Dressed in a fringed suede jacket and an "ass" trucker cap, he blended into the crowd like a native—until someone recognized him. That's bound to happen more now that Brad Pitt has produced a film version of Burroughs' painfully funny Running with Scissors, starring Annette Bening (it includes a cameo by the author). Burroughs talked about putting his pain out there for the world to see.

Queer Window: Do people question the genuineness of your subject matter because you're a memoirist?

Augusten Burroughs: My mother didn't like Running with Scissors. She thought the emphasis was all wrong: that it's not the story of a 12-year-old boy given away by his crazy mother to a lunatic psychiatrist, but rather the story of a brilliant Southern poet who lived in the repressive South and fought against that repression all her life, and finally came into her craven consciousness and wrote the work of her career. But you also come into the opposite, which is like my brother. He has Asperger's syndrome [a neurobiological disorder]. Facts matter to him. He loved Scissors because it jibed with what he saw and made him feel less ashamed about his past. He admitted that the character Bookman also tried to molest him when he was 13. That was something I never knew, and wouldn't have known it if I hadn't written the book.

Do lousy parents make good writers?

Sometimes they create writers or artists, but they also create senators and soccer moms. If you're a writer and you had an extraordinary life, you can recycle something bad and turn it into something good. It's hard for me to move past something without writing about it.

Do you live a gay life or a straight life?

Being gay was never something I struggled with. I didn't have any religious indoctrination at all. I used to get Jesus and Santa confused. It was to me like being right-handed. I'm not proud of being gay. I didn't do anything to be proud of. I'm not proud of being right-handed. It just happened.

What is your most compulsive behavior?

Chewing Nicorette gum. I always check my pockets to make sure I haven't misplaced anything, like credit cards and license. I've never lost them. I never will.