Augusten Burroughs
Augusten Burroughs born Christopher Robison, son of poet and writer Margaret Robison and younger brother of John Elder Robison.
Burroughs has no formal education beyond elementary school. A very successful advertising copywriter for over seventeen years, he was also an alcoholic who nearly drank himself to death in 1999. But spurned by a compulsion he did not understand, Burroughs began to write a novel. Never outlining or consciously structuring the book, Burroughs wrote, "as fast as I could type, to keep up." Seven days later, Augusten Burroughs had written his first book. He had also stopped drinking. The book was published one year later. Burroughs remains sober to this day. And Sellevision stands as Burroughs's only published novel. It is currently in development as a feature film.
Augusten's second book was a memoir. It was also a publishing phenomenon that helped to ignite a kind of memoir fever in America and abroad. Running with Scissors was released in 2001 to virtually unanimous critical acclaim. The memoir would ultimately remain on the New York Times bestseller list for over four consecutive years, eight months of which were spent in the #1 position. The film, starring Annette Benning, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jill Clayburgh and Alec Baldwin was released in 2005.
He has since published four additional autobiographical volumes (Dry, Possible Side Effects, Magical Thinking and A Wolf at the Table), all of them bestsellers. Currently published in over thirty countries, Augusten's book readings have become massively popular events on numerous continents. He has also headlined for the most prestigious literary festivals in the world, most recently the 2008 Melbourne writer's Festival, where he and Germaine Greer delivered the keynote addresses on opening night. In addition, Burroughs speaks regularly at colleges and universities on topics ranging from alcoholism and sexual abuse to the art of authoring one's own life and humor as serious medicine.
Twice honored by Entertainment Weekly as one of 25 funniest people in America, Burroughs shocked fans and the media alike with the release of A Wolf at the Table in early 2008. The brutal, terrifying and decidedly unfunny book instantly generated a storm of publicity and controversy. Critics were deeply divided, and the book received some of the worst -and best- reviews of the author's career. The book tour for A Wolf at the Table, spanned some six months and four countries, as Augusten performed for the largest crowds of his career. A Wolf at the Table is Augusten's bestselling hardcover to date.
While critics continue to challenge the veracity of Burroughs's books, questioning everything from his alcoholism and advertising career to his earliest childhood memories, the author remains nonplussed, even philosophical. "To be a journalist with a major American newspaper or magazine, you have to have an A-list college education. And to get into that A-list college, you had to do very well in the right high school. So the chances are, you were not being fucked up the ass at age twelve by a pedophile. The facts of my life are generally questioned by extremely privileged and well-educated people who, more likely than not, learned most of what they know about life's dangerous, shocking and sometimes unbelievable underbelly from books, television and the occasional Quentin Tarrantino film. The reason my books continue to sell, despite frequently being dismissed as "unbelievable," is because the people who read my books recognize the truth that is in them. They know the scent. They have smelled it. The very details the media view with such suspicion are the same details that prove to my reader, this guy was there. I remember that, too."
http://us.macmillan.com/author/august...
“Do not wait for the healing to arrive. It will never come. The holes will never leave or be filled with anything at all.But holes are interesting things.”
“Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off”
“Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time.”
“Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.”
“Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon.That's table sugar.You are made of the same stuff as table sugar.Just a couple of tiny differences here and there and look what happened to the sugar: it can stand upright and send tweets.”
“Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.”
“Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.”
“Truthfulness itself is almost medication, even when it’s served without advice or insight.”
“The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.”
“But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I'm shaped like a tube. Plus, I'm an alcoholic, a "survivor" of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne.”
“It seems like maybe we tried to sleep normally a long time ago, when Bentley was a puppy. But then he gradually moved from his little bed to the floor next to our bed. And then from the floor to the foot of the bed. And then from the foot to next to me. And now from next to me to between us, under the covers, with his head on a pillow next to ours.”
“Self-pity is the bestiality of emotions: it absolutely disgusts people. When you're feeling pity for yourself, and somebody says to you 'You think maybe it's time for the pity party to be over? You should stop feeling sorry for yourself and try to think positive,' it makes you wish you could saw their head off.”
“It was a salad bar of phobias”
“You must hang onto the scraps of the bucking moment as if your sanity and life depended on it - because actually they do.”
“Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others.But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.”
“The truth is that nobody is owed an apology for anything. Apologies are lovely when they happen. But they change nothing. They do not reverse actions or correct damage. They are merely nice to hear.”
“The truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air.”
“Are you one of those people who says on a first date, 'I'm really not in a hurry to meet somebody, I figure if it happens, it happens'? Because those are the most desperate people of all. I'm just saying this so that if you are this person, you aren't hiding it from anybody.There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody.”
“It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.Death is a head-on collision with your plans.But everything in life--the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat--everything there is was born from a collision.Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.And something new is created when the person you love dies.Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.”
“If you have one parent who loves you, even if they can't buy you clothes, they're so poor and they make all kinds of mistakes and maybe sometimes they even give you awful advice, but never for one moment do you doubt their love for you--if you have this, you have incredibly good fortune.If you have two parents who love you? You have won life's Lotto.If you do not have parents, or if the parents you have are so broken and so, frankly, terrible that they are no improvement over nothing, this is fine.It's not ideal because it's harder without adults who love you more than they love themselves. But harder is just harder, that's all.”
“I don't believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we're also simply too similar.”
“This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.”
“Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road.”
“You need to grab your dream out of the sky like it's a kite and pinch the string through your fingers until you reach the spool.”
“The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.”
“You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.”
“Let the people who want to have kids, have them. And let the rest of us spend the extra money on ourselves. Being gay doesn’t make you a bad person. Not wanting kids doesn’t make you a bad person. Perhaps crushing the bones in one little girl’s hand makes you a bad person, but that was an accident.”
“He likes people because he likes to share in conversations. I like people when they have large checks for me.”
“I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn't make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted to only these.”
“I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live.”
“Nothing surprises me now," I tell him. I am stoic. I am Joan of Arc, with liver damage and an unused penis.”
“Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic - seeing the car just as it hits you.”
“Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.”
“And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic.”
“And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany.”
“I understood at once, I am not living, but actively dying. I am smoking, living unhealthily. I’m shutting down. I need to go the other way, inside. And it was so clear to me what I was doing. It was suddenly perfectly clear. I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that’s all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse. And not worry about what to write about, but just write. Or, if I’m going to worry about what to write, then do this worrying on paper, so at least I’m writing and will have a record of the anxiety.”
“[My brother] shaped my young life. First, he taught me how to walk. Then, armed with sticks and dead snakes, he chased me and I learned how to run.”
“Will I end up in Hell along with the Hamburger Helping Hand, Joe Camel and Wendy, the Snapple Lady?”
“He was furious that the music house wanted forty grand. He wanted us to "Jew them down”
“Never work with children, puppies or bulimics”
“It is astonishingly satisfying to look at him and think Closet Case, and know he can read my mind as he looks away flushed. All Mormons are gay, I believe. Rick is merely a further example.”
“I once read about a guy who lost his arms in a fire. The nurse took pity on him and gave him a hand job. I don't even get that.”
“His toes wriggle in his socks and my first thought is, I want to snip them off with hedge trimmers. Not only does he not deserve to wriggle his toes, he does not deserve to have toes. He deserves to gave stumps. He cannot be trusted with toes because they enable him to walk and thus seek out the company of crack dealers. Kathy Bates's character completed understood this concept in Misery.”
“We haven't slept together. But we've napped”
“His laugh is made if porch swings and lemonade”
“I wish Rick would be gang-raped by a bunch of Muslim garbage collectors.”
“Well, somehow I felt if I sent Sally a donation, she would open the envelope herself and squeeze the cash into the hip pocket of her elastic- waist jeans. She would treat herself at Pizza Hut, using my envelope to dab pepperoni grease from her chin. I imagined her maybe having garlic cheese bread on the side and a salad of iceberg lettuce topped with blue- cheese dressing, Bacos and croutons.”
“After I cut off his penis, I sautéed it in rosemary butter and ate it""But did you go to a meeting afterwards?""Yes""I wouldn't worry about it, then.”
“If you're gay and live in New York and don't go to gym, eventually they come for you.”
“Freshly brainwashed from rehab, I carry the bottle into the bathroom. I hold it up to the light. See the pretty bottle? Isn't it beautiful? Yes, it's beautiful. I unscrew the cap and pour it into the toilet. I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, is of course, because I truly do know myself. I cannot be sure I won't attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.”