MetaChat - Augusten Burroughs!

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29 May 2008

Augusten Burroughs! →[More:]

So..Augusten Burroughs came to Portsmouth this week. Miko and I saw him give a reading last night, and today he was doing another signing at our local bookstore.

I was finishing up my latest journal, and gave him the last panel to do with as his pleased.

He drew a picture of his dog and a cow.

They were identical, except the cow had a colored-in patch on it's back so you knew it was a cow.

His fans at the signing were scary, loud women who shrieked with glee at getting their pictures taken with him and were gushing about "how the girls back at work WERE GOING TO DIE WHEN THEY HEARD."

So it goes with America's bad-boy memoirist.

I like the cow picture.

post by: Lipstick Thespian at: 12:36 | 24 comments

May I ask you a personal question?

posted by amro 29 May | 12:37

If it's about my painful childhood growing up in an insane family where molestation and toilet bowl readings took place, sure.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 29 May | 12:43

Oh, and also - turns out the cow picture is because he has two dogs, one named Bentley and the other one named The Cow. So, there you go.

Not a dog and a cow - but two dogs.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 29 May | 12:44

Nah, just wondering if you and Miko are still romantically involved. I can never tell, and I'm nosy.

posted by amro 29 May | 12:45

We're still together, yes.

But I don't like to talk about us online because it's not a good thing to do. I want to respect her privacy. I can say she's the most wonderful woman I've ever met, though.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 29 May | 12:47

Good, I'm glad it's going well and I shall ask no more questions!

posted by amro 29 May | 12:51

But if you don't share the private details of every moment of your life online, it's like you don't even exist!

posted by ThePinkSuperhero 29 May | 12:56

LOL @ TPS

posted by tr33hggr 29 May | 13:05

I don't even know where this thread is going anymore.

Can we talk about Augusten for the remainder? I'm interested in whether or not any of you read Running with Scissors, and then heard about the big lawsuit that came from the depicted family afterwards?

Let's talk about memoir veracity vs. the lure of fame.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 29 May | 13:23

i read it. It was okay. i think the movie was better as a whole. i think the parts of the book that worked the best for me was the sex and disbelief. The VF article was interesting.
i dislike the who memoir book that started over a decade ago. It was bad news from the start, how calling a book a memoir was suddenly better "box office" than fiction, also lending credence to more idiots who think their life stories are worth books or that they will ever write books at all.
How ever much he wiggled the truth, i think the problem is calling things a memoir instead of "based on" or even autobiographic "with the usually vagaries of the human memory" or "in service of fiction."

posted by ethylene 29 May | 13:30

whole memoir
stupid cursor float

posted by ethylene 29 May | 13:31

I liked the book better than the movie, but only because I think AB is a funny fucker. I never put him in the classic 'memoirs' category, I have always considered him a writer more along the lines of David Sedaris (another funny fucker), but never one I would consider as writing objective recorded 'truths'.
I wasn't at all surprised to see the lawsuit arise from Running with Scissors. The way he portrays that family, albeit it entertaining, borders on defamation. Amusing defamation, but defamation no less. I also liked the VF article.
If Augusten Burroughs weren't a recovering alcoholic, I would love to have a beer with him and just listen to him talk. Sedaris too. Ummm, Burroughs and Sedaris together.

posted by msali 29 May | 13:42

Magical Thinking was by far my favorite book.

posted by CitrusFreak12 29 May | 13:44

A quote I have heard attributed to David Sedaris: “When people ask me if these stories are true, I prefer to say that they are true enough."

I love that. It made me a touch less uncomfortable reading his work, which always felt too voyeuristic for me. (Which should also answer your actual question, LT: I haven't yet read Running with Scissors, in part because it felt like trespassing. I plan to overcome my fastidiousness, though.)

posted by Elsa 29 May | 13:45

I've read a few of his books, mainly because yeah, he's a funny fucker. I liked Dry the best. Then again, that was kind of the least funny (IMO) of his stuff that I've read. Huh.

posted by gaspode 29 May | 13:49

I'd rather hang out with William Burroughs and Amy Sedaris but maybe that's just me.

posted by jtron 29 May | 14:11

Hangin' with Wild Bill Burroughs these days is pretty boring, unless you bring your Ouija board along.

posted by bmarkey 29 May | 14:20

I want to see the drawing of the dogs!

posted by everichon 29 May | 15:01

I read RWS before the lawsuit. The lawsuit had no bearing on what I thought of the book. I think AB is funny (a different funny than David or Amy Sedaris) and didn't read the book as the the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help him, g-d.

In my regular every day life I'm always going to find the funny more truthy than the sad just because I think to get to the funny you have to work through the sad. Or something.

posted by fluffy battle kitten 29 May | 15:06

I'm glad it's going well and I shall ask no more questions!

Don't worry -- I'll tell you all about my sordid affair with LT in my forthcoming tell-all memoir!

ON a serious note. Burroughs was an incredibly entertaining speaker, very engaging. If he's reading in your town, you should go. But I definitely came away with the sense that he has a very melodramatic view of himself and events. What he's doing is built on biography, but seems to be painted in a rather extreme light. At one point, he was reading about how his father had the sociopath's talent of being extremely warm and engaging to the public while being an entirely different, calculating and cruel person underneath, and as he read it I watched him, thinking: to what extent is he describing his father, and to what extent, himself?

posted by Miko 29 May | 17:00

I love me some Augusten. Will read everything he publishes. David Sedaris is ok, but doesn't hold the same place in my heart. I really wish I got Amy Sedaris, but I actually kinda don't.

Sounds like a fun evening!

posted by rainbaby 29 May | 18:38

Hangin' with Wild Bill Burroughs these days is pretty boring, unless you bring your Ouija board along.

Well, you could set his corpse on fire and snort the ashes for a wicked buzz.

posted by jonmc 29 May | 18:41

I've never heard of him.

posted by deborah 29 May | 22:26

I liked Running With Scissors (book), and my foster kid loved it. So that's a rare occurrence, so it made me like the book even more.

I never imagined the book was word-for-word perfectly true.

I followed the lawsuit. I thought the family was portrayed in the book in a funny, OMG, over the top, semi-extreme way, but it also seemed to be a loving portrayal in a strange way, too.

posted by Claudia_SF 30 May | 00:40

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