REFLECTIONS ON HAVING A NEUROTIC mother as a child and battling addiction during adulthood have landed Augusten Burroughs on many bestseller lists. Now the gay writer mines his life once again for his latest book, “A Wolf at the Table.”
Decidedly darker than his previous memoirs, “A Wolf at the Table” fleshes out the author’s alcoholic father, who, Burroughs tells Southern Voice, had to die before Burroughs could begin the book. Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse brings Burroughs to Atlanta for a reading and book signing at the Alliance Theatre on May 18.
Southern Voice: Why did you decide to write about your father at this particular time?
Augusten Burroughs: Well, originally when I started “Running With Scissors,” I was going to begin [the book] earlier and that would’ve included some stories about my father, but it was just a Pandora’s box. “A Wolf at the Table” has been in me all my life, certainly, and it was only after my father died in 2005 that I was able to start writing it because I suddenly felt free — I felt free from him and free of him.
It’s a much darker book because I hadn’t yet developed that humor, or irony, or cynicism as a defense mechanism, so it’s a more brutal — there is no spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
SoVo: What’s it like to write multiple memoirs, in the sense of not confining one’s life story to a single book?
Burroughs: Well, it’s impossible to capture anyone’s life in a single book. Indeed, even with as many memoirs as I’ve written, each memoir is only the tip of the iceberg. Before you set out to write a memoir, you want to be able to capture the entire experience, but it’s impossible, so you just try to give the reader the best sort of experience — you want them to read the book and have a real sense of what you went through, and what it felt like and what it meant.
SoVo: Do you have any advice for adults who had or have difficult relationships with their parents?
Burroughs: I think you want to mend your relationship with your parents if at all possible, even remotely. I worked for years, and years, and years, and years trying to gain a relationship with my father, but my father was a sociopath so he was an extraordinarily unusual and rare example of a bad father.
Under ordinary circumstances, a person obviously has to trust their instincts. If you grew up a victim of ritual sexual abuse at the hands of your father, I would say, yes, stay clear of the guy. But if it was more normal — maybe your father was distant, or your mother was distant, or maybe they were an alcoholic and yet now have been in recovery for a number of years — absolutely go forward.
You want to try to have the best relationships and the healthiest relationships you can have in your life, and hopefully that will include your parents. But if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t, and that’s OK, too.
SoVo: Can you offer Atlanta fans any previews of your future projects?
Burroughs: Well I’m working on a couple of novels, and I’ll find out which one makes it to the finish line first. And I’m also working on, yes, more autobiographical works, including a book about Christmas.
I’ve always loved Christmas, it’s been my favorite holiday since I was a little kid, and every single holiday has been an absolute hideous nightmare.
It’s a collection of funny, horrible holiday stories called, “You Better Not Cry.” There’s a great, great, great, great Atlanta — Lawrenceville, Ga., via Atlanta — story in there that involves Santa Claus, a baby Jesus and a hospital stomach-pumping.
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