Running From Wolves
Augusten Burroughs is an openly gay writer who achieved mainstream success and bestseller status with a series of serio-comic, hilariously horrific and brutally self-deprecating memoirs covering his tragic upbringing, alcoholism and, worst of all, success working in advertising. During a whirlwind press tour promoting his current bestseller A Wolf At The Table Burroughs took time to chat with Drew Rowsome and explain how his painful past became his fulfilling present.

“Whoever thought that a book featuring a 15-yearold being fucked up the butt by a 34-year-old mental patient would become a mainstream bestseller?” Augusten Burroughs, author of Running With Scissors and the just released A Wolf At The Table, is more amused than surprised. He confides that his popular reading tours, a combination of stand-up comedy and cathartic pathos, are well attended in the conservative deep south of the US. Especially Atlanta where he attracts “a very Republican audience. Very well put together in their suits from work. This is the town where I can read the raunchiest parts. And, of course, San Francisco…”

Burroughs was able to pepper his early books with explicit gay sex, and events that would normally horrify, courtesy of his witty way with words. A Wolf At The Table, his sixth book, is the first that’s not laugh-out-loud funny, even if those previous laughs were perversely designed to catch in one’s throat. A Wolf At The Table is a dark brutal tale of Burroughs’ abuse at the hands of the “alcoholic sociopath” who was his father. Burroughs brushes the lack of guffaws away: the book is a memoir of his early childhood and “my sense of humour didn’t engage ’til 12 or 13.”

Following the James Frey debacle Burroughs has also been under attack for the accuracy of his memoirs but he remains unconcerned. A Wolf At The Table is not an analysis of what happened, nor is it an attempt to understand it. The book is Burroughs recreating the events and his emotions as he remembers them. There is no need for balance as A Wolf At The Table effectively creates the mindset of a terrorized child and the powerlessness, and innocent associations, which most of us have forgotten. To read A Wolf At The Table is to crawl inside the mind of a pre-pubescent Burroughs and experience, explicitly from his perspective, his life at that time.

In person Burroughs is intense and obviously on a mission. The words spill out and his anger is palpable. He bemoans the number of books extolling fathers and fatherhood while ignoring the fact that many people had “horrible fathers.” It astonishes Burroughs how many people come up to him at book signings “saying ‘Me too.’” He temporarily mists over as he recounts a teenage girl in Philadelphia who apologized when handing Burroughs a dog-eared — “hardcover, and they’re expensive” — copy of A Wolf At The Table to sign. “Nothing is more of an honour than to see a broken-up copy,” emphasizes Burroughs. The girl’s father, also alcoholic and abusive, had died just three days before and reading A Wolf At The Table had helped her survive. Burroughs took a treasured necklace from around his neck and gave it to the girl saying, “This is going to protect you.”

Burroughs is also proud of the audiobook version of A Wolf At The Table. “I couldn’t read it like the others except in a lower register, my inner Kathleen Turner tones. Personally I find them boring with tacky stock music and the author going on and on. I wanted a score like a motion picture,” describes Burroughs. So he contacted some of his favourite singer/songwriters. He was astonished with the affirmative responses he got, especially from punk icon Patti Smith and Canadian upstarts Tegan and Sara. “It was a shock when they said yes,” he marvels.

The original songs, while eerily effective on tape, also worked in reverse. Burroughs met a fan, “hard to pin her age down from the late fifties to early eighties,” who, after encountering Tegan and Sara’s song on the A Wolf At The Table audiobook, had insisted that her grandchildren load a copy of the duo’s album The Con onto her iPod. It serves to illustrate how open and diverse Burroughs’ readers are. Burroughs believes that by being honest and stripping himself bare individually he becomes universal. “People go ohmigod this is me. This is how I feel about men,” notes Burroughs. And most importantly: “I’m not alone.”

The only fans that Burroughs has no clue about are the “15-year-old gay kids with boyfriends. Astonishing,” he says with what seems like a touch of envy. Though his own coming out process, documented with horrifying humour in Running With Scissors, was anything but simple he doesn’t hold a grudge and considers any reader “a privilege.”

However Burroughs claims that writing “should not be therapy. Or an exorcism. I’m the same man as before.” Pulling the memories up is “easy to trigger but very emotional.” The memories of his father were so painful that Burroughs found the writing “really brutal,” especially after deciding not to use his usual crutches. “It would have been easy to do the same thing but different – just like advertising. I’m product now. I could have made the book funny but it would have been dishonest. You would have felt tricked. I just hoped the readers would come along.” The readers have come along: A Wolf At The Table is Burroughs’ fastest and best-selling book, despite several negative reviews and skepticism about the veracity of his memories.

Burroughs insists that “there is something different about my brain. I know I’m not lying but I remember being eight years old.” He shrugs. “How could you not remember?” Burroughs believes that he has an almost photographic memory that may be the result of a mild form of autism or Asberger’s syndrome. This unfortunately makes the book’s most harrowing passage, which then is totally undercut by being revealed to possibly be a dream, seem like a bit of a cheat. Burroughs is, once again, unconcerned stating that A Wolf At The Table is not a memoir but rather an “internalized memory.”

It is hard to believe that Burroughs would vilify his father for profit or for spite. The pages ache with the agony of a little gay boy simply wanting his father’s love. If the childhood memories are tainted by the limited analytical thinking of an eight-year-old it also makes the story all that more powerful.

And Burroughs has no reason to make more money. As he puts it: “the movie promoted the book” so while the film version of Running With Scissors was a flop it spurred massive sales of the book. “When I decided to become a writer I decided to become poor,” muses Burroughs. “I left a six figure advertising job with three hundred dollars in my pocket.” He smiles. “Do what you love and the money will follow. If the money doesn’t follow at least you’re doing what you love.”


Drew Rowsome is an associate editor at fab and fortunately has no father issues and no fear of daddies.