While the many people who write
Internet blogs telling stories from their lives get few readers, Augusten
Burroughs has managed to convince publishers to print his stories.  Indeed,
people love them.  This new collection of his work is currently in the top 1000
best sellers on Amazon.com and his abused-childhood memoir Running with
Scissors was a New York Times bestseller.  It is worth thinking about why
people are so fascinated by the details of other people’s lives.  Burroughs’
first memoir was about how he had a crazy family and was virtually abandoned as
a young teenager, left to stay with the family of his mother’s psychiatrist,
where he was allowed to get involved with a pedophile in his thirties and
completely dropped out of high school.  Burroughs’ second memoir, Dry,
was about his alcoholism, his treatment at a rehab center for homosexuals in
Minnesota, and his struggles with sobriety and Alcoholics Anonymous while
living in New York City.  It is easy to see the enjoyment and shock value in
reading about the details of an utterly dysfunctional childhood, and while the
genre of addiction memoir is reasonably saturated, the twist of being a gay
alcoholic makes Dry different enough from the rest of the pack.

However, the stories in Magical
Thinking are mainly about his current life.  The main exception is first
story in the collection, which tells about the time when he was a young boy and
television-advertising executives came to his small town to shoot an
advertisement for a soft drink.  It was an important event in Burroughs’ life
because it showed how much he wanted to get the attention from others and was
able to get the executives to agree to put him in the ad.  It was also
significant because it gave him a glimpse of his own future career, since
Burroughs’ himself became a copywriter when he finally left home and arrived in
the metropolis.  The story also foreshadowed his tendency to mess up and hurt
his own chances.  On the other hand, the tale says almost nothing about his
family, and relies mainly on the reader’s interest in Burroughs’ life.  The
same is true for the other stories in the book, which are mostly about his life
after alcoholism, some about the period before he his first book (the novel Sellavision)
was published, and some about the time after, as he starts to become better
known and eventually has a best-selling memoir published. 

So it is all about Augusten.  As
with the recent writing of David Sedaris, these essays depend on the writer’s
charm and our interest in the lifestyles of the gay and famous.  He writes
about his undertaker boyfriend, his work as a copywriter, his brother with
Asperger’s syndrome, his psychotic cleaning woman, his long-term relationship
with his boyfriend Dennis, and various other episodes from his life.  He is an
entertaining writer, because he is quirky, vulnerable, a little shocking, and
uniformly acerbic.  These qualities are enhanced in the unabridged audiobook
read by Burroughs himself, and this adds to the sense that we are getting to
know him well.  He performs his own work well, and he seems a likeable guy,
especially in the final extra on the audiobook, an interview with him in which
he just talks about his life now and gives a few anecdotes.  He is in a stable
relationship and he has stopped drinking, so he is probably a great person to
know, even if by his own admission he is obsessed with himself.  Readers get to
have their own relationship with him through reading his writings about his
life. 

I was pleased to listen to this
audiobook and I expect I will read Burroughs’ inevitable subsequent memoirs. 
Yet I am not sure what to make of the phenomenon.  Maybe we should wonder
whether it is good for us to be listening to the reflections and stories of
people whose main accomplishment is to be survive their abused childhoods and
self-destructive behavior with a wry sense of humor.  But then again, I’m not
sure whose stories I would prefer to be hearing. 

Links: Reviews of

• Running
  with Scissors
• Dry

© 2005 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.