It's Never Too Late To Have A Crappy Childhood

Arive westward out of Boston on the Mass pike for two hours, get off at the exit for Route 91 and negotiate a succession of ever-narrowing back roads past sprawling graveyards and gaunt woodlands haunted by the ghosts of Pontiac Indians the British army General Jeffrey Amherst obliterated with gifts of smallpox infested blankets a couple of hundred years ago. Keep going another hour and you’ll come to the settlement they named in his dubious honour.

Amherst, in the Pioneer valley, Western Massachusetts, is a quirky place – at once a small town with a big city mentality and a Puritan settlement with a militantly liberal mindset. New Age quackery has always been big business here, but as well as being flake central, it’s also a seat of learning. The surrounding districts, from Hadley to Hockanum, Agawam to Northampton (the location of films like Neil Jordan’s In Dreams and the Nicole Kidman thriller Malice) are dotted with colleges: Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, Mt Holyoke and the University of Massachusetts (eulogised in The Pixies’ tune ‘U-Mass’). That Amherst’s most famous natives sons and daughters include Emily Dickinson and J Mascis says a lot about the place.
This is the topography of Augusten Burroughs’ childhood, a handsome fellow with closely shorn hair, a scrub of beard and spectacles, a soft twang in his accent belying several years spent in the South before his parents moved to New England. He’s in Dublin on a flying visit to promote his fourth book Magical Thinking, a collection of autobiographical essays ranging in subject from his fascination with transsexuals, to his drink drenched career in advertising and how some of the best blowjobs he ever got were from Catholic priests. There are also accounts of miscellaneous disastrous encounters on the New York dating scene and the story of meeting his long-term main-squeeze Dennis. Touching and funny, I got through it in a day.
His work first came to my attention several years ago when the author JT LeRoy (Sarah, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things) insisted I read Running With Scissors, the memoir that propelled Burroughs onto the USA Today masthead and the New York Times bestseller lists. (Nip/Tuck writer/director Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation starring Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow and Alec Baldwin among others, has wrapped and is due for release next year).
Running With Scissors was not your average fucked-up childhood yarn. True, Burroughs was raised by a poisonously repressed father and an almost psychotically self-obsessed unpublished poetess of a mother, both of whom frequently threatened to kill each other. Among the various eye-popping scenes related in the book is the account of the afternoon the adolescent Burroughs walked in on his naked mother getting head from her friend the vicar’s wife. She in turn dumped him with a psychiatrist by the name of Dr Finch and his extended family in a congested, dirty, deafening and deranged household where screaming was considered a healthy expression of anger and the youngest child had a habit of crapping under the piano, when the dog wasn’t licking his penis. Finch’s 33-year old adopted son statutorily raped Burroughs when he was 14; the two subsequently had a relationship that lasted for several years. There were copious quantities of prescription drugs, an ECT machine, Dr Finch’s private Masturbatorium and the family’s propensity for divining the future in their toilet bowl floaters. Like all Burroughs’ books, this stuff is rendered with an exquisitely laconic sensibility devoid of poor-poor-pitiful-me indulgence.
But it wasn’t just the prose style that grabbed me: the more I read of Burroughs, the more convinced I was that I married his female alter ego – the daughter of college professors who came of age in Western Mass., and, like Burroughs, lived in a glass house in the creepy Amherst woods and spent her teenage years dodging the tie-dyed and the terminally damaged. She even had her own encounters with a ‘progressive’ shrink of dubious character and intent.
“Really?” Burroughs says, raising an eyebrow as he alternately sips coffee and chews nicotine gum at a table in the Morgan Hotel on Fleet Street. “That’s wild. That is soooo funny. Maybe I know him. What was his name? Cos I changed the name of my shrink. Finch isn’t his real name; I’m not allowed to say what it was. Find out. I mean, how many shrinks could there be that were discredited in 1999 or whatever?”
A quick phone call establishes that they we’re not talking about the same individual, so we can only conclude that dodgy psychiatrists tend to gravitate to the same area, like a paedophile ring.
“There were paedophiles out there too,” Burroughs says, “things I didn’t write about in Running With Scissors. A lot of strangeness in that area.”
And it is a strange area. Pilgrim country, an hour from Salem, and home to a whole litany of American Gothics: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Dickinson, Lovecraft. Nowadays it’s an arty hotspot buzzing with writing workshops and poetry slams, a sort of collision point between the old school Crucible mentality and post-hippy libertarianism.
“It’s almost like mixing bleach and ammonia and the toilet explodes!” Burroughs says. “After Running With Scissors was released, I heard from a high concentration of people from that area who wrote me and said that they had the same childhood, verbatim. So you wonder what was it about that area at that point of time in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s? Maybe it’s what you say, it’s the puritanical mindset mixed with that post-hippy thing.”
And yet, living shoulder to shoulder with the professors and poets, you can see all the mutant and morbidly obese rednecks gathering in places like the Holyoke Mall.
“It’s so weird to hear those words, in that accent, in this country,” he laughs. “It seems like a violation! Like you’re going to just disappear in a poof of smoke right now and this didn’t happen. But it’s very strange. I mean there are some very famous actors who live out near Western Mass, and then you do have that inbred population of people who’ve just about got two heads. And they co-exist.”
Maybe that area is so tolerant of eccentrics that none of them ever see the need to leave. Which would explain why Burroughs is about the only new writer to have emerged from what is an uncommonly artist-friendly environment. The weirdness seems to be absorbed and contained within the state limits.
“It’s encouraged. Look at Hampshire College where you can literally major in Frisbee throwing. It’s an environment conducive to whatever eccentricity you want to develop.”

Augusten Burroughs did leave Amherst for New York when he was 19 to pursue advertising, a job that paid enough for him to drink himself senseless and cruise the bars looking to hump anything in a pair of chinos. Or jeans. Or a cassock (but more about that later.)
“A friend talked me into going to computer programming school in Braintree, Massachusetts, which is north of Boston,” he explains. “I saw a commercial for the school on TV, and it was such a bad commercial, so cheesy, and I was like, ‘I’m just sooo not at Yale. I could do a better ad than that.’ And that’s how I got into advertising. I also decided that I would become a new person, so I changed my first, middle and last name legally. I’ve been Augusten longer than my previous name, which was Chris, and I just erased my past and never thought about it. And once I got out into the real world, it became quickly, immediately and profoundly obvious to me that my childhood was not one I could ever talk about. A lot of people have had messed up childhoods, but mine was by far more unusual, more warped, more sort of unmentionable than any I’d heard of, and so I just didn’t ever think about it.”
“I had all these problems and I didn’t know why I had them,” he continues. “After I spent all these years from 18 to 30 drunk and working in advertising, I was finally forced into rehab and a little bit of my childhood started to float to the surface. I started to look at how deeply fucked up and weird my childhood was. I relapsed, got sober for a while, and then my best friend Pighead died (an episode chronicled in Burroughs’ third book Dry) and I started drinking worse than I ever had before and came really close to dying. My heart would not beat correctly; it was missing beats. And I realised that I was okay with dying. I’d had so many experiences, and I’d lived a huge life, and also felt very, very, very old.
“But one thing that bothered me is that I’d never even tried to write. So I wrote Sellevision and it changed my life. It exploded out of me after the alcohol poisoning. I wrote it in seven days and didn’t know what I was doing from one word to the next. No plot, no character, very funny and light, a total cheese popcorn book. I didn’t know if it was a good book or a bad book, but it was a book, it was 150 pages and I’d numbered them, Page Num, Microsoft Word. And I decided I was going to become a writer, and I would never stop. Eventually, somehow, I would write something that would get published, and I might be 40 or 50 or even 60, but it would happen. I was just going to live in a small town in America where it was cheap and I wouldn’t have any expenses, I’d rent a room and never stop writing. It was like entering… what do you call it when you become a nun?”
A convent.
“A convent. I was going to enter basically a literary convent where I didn’t do anything except write. And then I got an agent and he sold Sellevision to a publisher, which I couldn’t believe. It changed my life. Three weeks before they published it, I decided, ‘I’m ready for a relationship’, so I went to personals online, and I decided, ‘I’m going to find exactly the person I want.’ So I typed in an age group, 45 to 47 – cos I feel more comfortable with people who are older, they’ve survived more – and all these ridiculously narrow qualities. The first picture was a very handsome guy with a goatee sitting in front of a wall of books. So that was Dennis. We met two weeks before Sellevision was published. I just loved him. It was very slow, there were no fireworks really, but there was recognition that this was him, I knew it when we were sitting in Starbucks and I asked him about his background: ‘Oh you’re Catholic? So did you go to Catholic school? Oh, so what was that like?’ And as he told me about it, his voice grew louder and louder and louder with anger over the nuns, and I just thought, ‘He’s crazy!’”
Augusten always had a thing for Catholics. Especially priests. Even when they’re in plainclothes, his radar seems to pick up their biorhythms. The chapter in Magical Thinking entitled ‘Holy Blowjobs’ details his being seduced by a handsome young priest, except rather than some grim child abuse scenario, Burroughs equates it with a straight kid’s Playboy bunny fantasy.
“I was not raised with religion and I never knew anything about it,” he protests. “When I was a little kid I used to confuse Jesus and Santa all the time: ‘Why does Santa give the good presents and then Jesus gives, like, crutches, wheelchairs?’ So I never had a fantasy involving priests. It never was something that I actively sought or was exposed to as a child in church and had passions for. To me they were just normal guys like everyone else, except they had built walls. The ones I met were different in certain ways than other men I’d met. There was something a little bit sad and isolated about them, like they were denying themselves something, and I was drawn to that sadness, there was something familiar about it. My mother and I would sometimes go (to mass) and I always liked the weird incense thing. And they’d give you little cookies.”
Oh mother of divine Moses. Augusten has just referred to the most holy and sacred Eucharist, the transubstantiated flesh of Our Lord Jesus Christ, as a cookie. This is like the time I got an Easter e-mail from an American acquaintance wishing me a Happy Bunny Day. The Son of God martyrs Himself on the cross in order to eradicate the sin of all mankind, and His sacrifice is reduced to a frigging chocolate rabbit.
“You know what I mean though. What is it called? The wafers?”
Holy Communion.
“Communion, okay. I always wanted those things.”
After Sellevision was published to warm reviews but negligible sales, Burroughs wrote his rehab memoir Dry. But in the interim between acceptance and publication, the author outlined to his publishers his ideas for a third book, Running With Scissors. The publishers insisted that he write and submit it as soon as possible, and rescheduled Dry as the follow-up. Augusten complied, feeling secure enough to revisit his warped formative years.
“When I met Dennis I knew I had to write Running With Scissors,” he explains. “I put it off for about a year, and I was in a panic. I had started it a couple of times and it was so dark and ugly, I couldn’t even write it. And I thought, ‘I’m going to have to read my journals from childhood, that’s the only way I’m going to be able to do this.’ I’d never opened the boxes they were stored in because I didn’t want to have to see that miserable tortured 14 year old in the process of getting ruined. So I opened the box up and picked up the first journal and started reading it and it cracked me up. It was funny. And I had no idea that I was funny then. My childhood was so much fun in so many ways, wild and free, but it was also hopeless. But I didn’t focus on that, because as a child I didn’t either. It was a battle inside myself to not think too closely about the actual circumstances of my life because I wanted much more for myself, so I always had to remain blindly, manically optimistic, oblivious.”
I tell Burroughs that the feeling I get from Running With Scissors is the same one I used to experience when the teacher left the classroom and the kids would become rowdier and noisier while I sat cringing at the bedlam, muttering, ‘Please stop.”
“That’s exactly what my childhood felt like in that house,” he says. “You’ve just described it perfectly; I’ve never been able to describe it. So that’s how you were, huh?”
I was also struck by the details of how, as a child, Burroughs had a psychosomatic habit of smoothing down his hair or fixing the crease in his pants, as if he was checking all his limbs were still attached.
“I still do that. I have other things now. I try not to do them, but I still do this constantly (adjusts his spectacles.) I get them so they fit exactly evenly on my ear so that the pressure feels the same. I’m not as plagued by it as I used to be, but even now, we’ll go upstairs to bed and we’ll have had a microwave dinner and I’ll be lying in bed with the doors closed, all lights off, and I’ll think: ‘What if… maybe you brushed the stove when you walked past it and turned on the gas.’ And I’ll get out of bed and go downstairs and then I’ll look. And even though I can look immediately and see they’re all off, I will bend down and touch it: ‘That’s off, that’s off, that’s off and that’s off,’ and then I’ll turn around and think: ‘But what if by touching it now, I accidentally turned it on slightly!’”
He also has the hand-washing hygiene fixation that is a symptom of obsessive-compulsive behaviour.
“I have to moisturise my hands constantly. Normally they’re all bloody because I wash them at least a hundred times a day.”
That’s very Lady MacBeth.
“That’s what the other interviewer said to me. I didn’t know anything about Lady MacBeth.”
She was so consumed by guilt at being a murderess she constantly tried to rub the invisible blood off her hands. Shakespeare knew a thing or two about psychology.
“Oh wow. I’ve gotta read him. I get put off by it because I get intimidated by it.”
He should watch Al Pacino’s Looking For Richard.
“That’s who you look like. I was trying to figure out you look like. Are you related in any way? You’ve got that kinda look.”
This is my cue to flutter coquettishly and call Mr Burroughs a dirty flirt.
“No you do, you look like that. I was trying to think of who you look like and that’s exactly who it is.”
I’m inclined to think he’s mixing up Pacino with Richard III, but such humility ill becomes me. It does, however, suit the author. One of the sub-texts of Magical Thinking is how, throughout the course of the author’s life, a craven hunger for fame was slowly replaced by the longing to pursue his craft as a writer. And of course, no sooner did he devote himself to the work that he achieved recognition. Maybe it was the “fourth-tier celebrity” of a successful writer rather than the flashbulbs and tiaras success he fantasised about as a kid, but enough to get him recognised in public. Some of the funniest passages in the new book describe how total strangers who’ve read Running With Scissors feel obliged to confess their most bizarre secrets to Burroughs. Like the pleasant-looking grandmother outside Fairway Market who told him that when she was a child her mother subjected her to Dr Pepper enemas and made her drink the discharge.
“You know, what’s weird is, the few that are freaks I wrote about in there,” he says, “but for the most part, people are really, really warm, and if they do talk they’re great. It always makes me feel incredibly… I wish I had a bigger vocabulary… um, humbling isn’t the right word. It’s sacred. There’s something sacred about it, and I didn’t expect ever to have that kind of a feeling. When I was a kid I really wanted to be famous, and after so much happened, especially after Pighead died, that feeling went away and I didn’t care anymore. All I wanted or cared about was love and family, home. So when I got that, that’s when I became famous, a different kind of famous, a lower level. It’s not a Gwyneth Paltrow, but it’s famous enough that whenever I go out I get recognised.
“And instead of feeling as I imagined when I was young, which was multitudes of people all at once, and never one face, but bodies and flashbulbs, so that I could walk through it with my eyes focused on a distant point, it’s the opposite. It’s one person who knows everything about me and likes me and is willing to be completely honest and open. It’s the strangest instant profound intimacy. It’s startling. It’s startling. And it’s also very moving, and I didn’t ever, ever expect that. It’s the opposite of that flashbulb. It’s like a candle.”
The title chapter of the new book is interesting in that it begins as a riff on delusional or obsessive behaviour and then spins off into a eulogy on the power of positive thinking.
“It’s dangerous to talk about ’cos it can easily sound motivational and false, but I’ve seen it again and again,” he concludes. “Anything I’ve ever wanted in my life I’ve achieved, and I’ve often wanted very bad things. I have a very hard time believing in destiny and things that are preordained, and yet, when I look at my own life, I realise that everything happened at the only time it possibly could have happened. I sometimes will think, ‘My god, why didn’t I start writing at 19?’ And I don’t have to think about that for too long to know that if I did, I would’ve destroyed my life. I can imagine what I would’ve done with money and popularity and the fact that I could’ve dated anybody I wanted not because of who I was, but what I did. It would’ve just been the fuckin’ end of me, absolutely the end. Parties constantly. And now, I mean, I’m just like a homebody. Dennis and the dogs. There’s no temptation.”

Magical Thinking is published by Atlantic.