To say that Augusten Burroughs’ road to becoming a best-selling author was a rocky one would be an egregious understatement. Burroughs’ childhood was marred by his relationship with an abusive and alcoholic father. At age 12, his mentally ill mother deposited him with the family of her psychiatrist, where he lived in squalor and was sexually abused by the doctor’s son. This upbringing paved the way for years of alcoholism, which persisted even as he worked as a successful and award-winning ad writer in New York. During his road to recovery, his closest friend died of AIDS, spurring him to relapse. Burroughs has documented many of these events in his extremely candid but surprisingly funny memoirs, “Running With Scissors” and “Dry.” Now, with many years of sobriety under his belt and a new best-selling book out, Burroughs is one of the hottest American authors out there. Filming for a movie based on his first novel, “Sellevision,” should begin this summer, and he is already at work on at least three other books. Burroughs is currently touring the nation in support of “Wolf at the Table,” which chronicles his childhood years with his deranged father. The book is somewhat of a departure for Burroughs, as it is almost entirely devoid of the kind of dark humor that characterized his earlier works. A crowd of fans will have a chance to hear Burroughs read excerpts from the book at South Church in Portsmouth on Wednesday, May 28 (the event is sold out). The Wire caught up with Burroughs by phone in advance of his local appearance. 

In your previous works, you had a way of blending humor with tragedy so that both were equally salient. How do you manage to make people laugh without compromising the seriousness of the content?

Well, it’s nothing I do intentionally or consciously, really. In other words, I don’t sit down and adjust the ratio of laughs to pathos. And actually, “Wolf at the Table” doesn’t really have any humor in it to speak of. It’s just a brutal, really harrowing story. That was really the only way I could write “Wolf,” because it needed to give the reader a case drive of what it was like growing up, and I had not yet sharpened my sense of observation to a sufficiently sharp point where it became an actual sense of humor. In other words, during “Running with Scissors,” when I was 12, 13, 14, I was faced with such catastrophic living circumstances, just on all sides, that my brain had to come to a decision: Either kill yourself, or focus over there on the turkey carcass. I just began to see what was funny or absurd in a situation. I began to look at the jiggling underbelly. This sense of humor then became the lens through which I would view the rest of my life. And that’s where the humor in “Dry,” certainly, and “Magical Thinking” and “Possible Side Effects” all comes from, is just being nothing really much more than a refined survival coping mechanism. “Wolf at the Table” takes place, chronologically, before all my other books. I was a little boy living with, essentially, a psychopathic, very sick father—a sociopathic father. I was earnest, and it’s just this sort of bald, vulnerable earnestness that kids have. Kids don’t have sophisticated defense mechanisms, or at least this one didn’t. I was just overwhelmed by the silent, creeping horror of what I experienced with my father as a kid. It would take years before that sense of humor developed.

You’ve written some pretty candid stuff not only about yourself, but about some of the people who have been closest to you. Has your published work affected your relationships with the people you’ve written about?

No, I mean, I’ve written about my brother (John) and (boyfriend) Dennis. My brother is a perfect example of that. My brother has gone on to be published himself. I wrote about my older brother John’s Asperger syndrome in “Possible Side Effects” and “Magical Thinking.” From that point on, people with Asperger’s Syndrome or somewhere else on the spectrum of autism, they would show up at readings and at my events. I felt like such a poor ambassador for the spectrum, having merely an older brother with it and these two meager stories about it to my entire library of work. So, I felt there was a need for a memoir about Asperger Syndrome, and I decided my brother should write it. So I told my brother he should write it and he did. What was surprising is that it was any good. That was the surprise to me.

I think that a lot of writers write about themselves but do it through a fictional character so that there’s some distance or separation there. Does it ever make you feel vulnerable to have all these personal and sometimes sordid details about your life available to the public? 

No, I don’t care anymore. I’ve gone through so much in my life, the last thing I care about is what a stranger thinks of me or judges me. I mean, that’s originally how I felt. I’ve come now to feel a great humility and feel honored by how my readers feel about me. I’ve found that no matter what I have written, no matter how horrifying it may be to put into print or how ashamed I am of my behavior or how ashamed of the experience, it doesn’t matter what I’ve said. Someone, somewhere in the world has come up to me and said, “Me too,” or “I did exactly the same thing,” or “I felt exactly the same way.” So, originally, I just didn’t really care what people thought. It’s like going through cancer and having chemotherapy and radiation treatment. You don’t give a shit what color your hair comes back. It just doesn’t matter. That’s kind of how I felt. Whatever—curly or brown or gray—it’s so the least of what I’m concerned with is what other people think. That changed as I toured and became bigger and met my audience. It was just a profoundly moving experience to meet so many people who I never knew existed who I shared so much in common with. Having said that, I still do not write for other people, and I don’t edit myself because maybe this will be too—fill in the blank—for my readers. I will edit myself if I feel like I’ve already published on this particular topic before, or published too much of this particular topic, or if I’m repeating myself in an unnecessary way, but I won’t edit myself because it makes me vulnerable or puts me in an awkward position, because it really doesn’t.

So, really, it’s just kind of a side effect that you’ve found that people really relate to a lot of the things you’ve written.

That’s exactly the word. That’s exactly it. I did not set out to be helpful, unfortunately. I wish I could say I had more altruistic goals as an author. But that’s what happened.

You write about that a bit in one of the stories in “Magical Thinking,” called “I’m Gonna Live Forever,” where you talk about how people come up to you and want to share their stories. Does that continue to happen when you’re out on reading tours?

It does, oh yeah, it happens all the time. It happens whenever I’m out in public. And 99.99999 percent of the time it’s amazing, it’s great. The ice is broken and people just open themselves up. Usually it doesn’t feel invasive and creepy.

In that same story, you describe how desperately, at one time, you wanted to be a famous author. Now you are a famous, best-selling author. Has that altered your approach to writing in any way?

When I was younger I wanted to be famous, but I wanted to be famous in the 1970s way, you know, like a Mike Douglas Show—that kind of old ’70s variety show way. Not the fame of today, where it’s up-the-skirt paparazzi shots and just the ruthless micro-examination of the tiniest aspects of dysfunction in the personal life of a given person. Anyway, I wanted to be famous in that kind of way. That kind of went away after George, Pighead from “Dry” … In “Dry” I talk about this guy Pighead. He was the person that meant the most to me and he died. And when he died a lot of things changed inside of me, and they never went back the way they were, and one of those things was the desire for fame. That went away, I didn’t care about that at all. I didn’t care about a lot of things I used to care about. It’s ironic, then, that I ended up becoming famous, because I just did not care at all. I ended up writing myself out of the grave of alcoholism, and that literally gave me something to live for and stop drinking for. Seven days into writing my first book I was finished with my first book. Four days into writing my first book I’d stopped drinking for the rest of my life, and on the seventh day I finished the book.

Do you feel that also, looking back, your relationship with your father, however negative it may have been, in some ways helped shape you as a writer and turn you into a writer?

Oh, without a doubt. My mother really gave me the easy access. I have been writing since before I could write. I would speak into a little blue Panasonic tape recorder. My mother was the one that sort of taught me how to write in the sense of, don’t think about writing as anything with a capital “w.” These are not her words, she wasn’t this formal. She somehow transferred the knowledge that I should use writing to get what is inside of me, my head and my heart, what I felt, onto the page directly with nothing lost in translation and nothing added or fussed over, just a very seamless transition from feeling and experience and thought to paper. So, writing is the most natural thing in the world to me. I’ve always written. But it was my father that gave me a burning need to communicate, to reach other people. So I think (I learned) to publish, actually, from my father.    

Was it a difficult experience writing “Wolf at the Table”? Was it cathartic?

Yeah, it was horrible. It was horrible. It wasn’t like writing any of the other books. It was two years and it was just really, really ugly and awful. I would never want to do it again. That said, it was unavoidable. When my father died in 2005 and I inherited his journals, I just felt free for the first time in my life. But I didn’t feel complete, and I knew the only way to do that would be to go back and tell the story of my father. It took a couple years, and I was just incredibly, profoundly depressed during the writing of the book. I lived in my basement and wrote the book down there, alone, and it was just really harrowing and not fun. But that’s just the only way it could be. I have very vivid memories of very early childhood, and that’s great, but it’s a double-edged sword because it’s very vivid. It’s very real, and the memories bring back the original emotions and all of that.

Having now finished the book and gotten it out there, is there a sense of release for you?

Ahmmm … Yeah, it is, absolutely. It’s a little package. I’ve been able to put my father into his coffin.

Have you been able to forgive your father?

No, “forgive” isn’t a word I would use. “Forgive” is like a television word. “Forgive” is like “heal.” “Forgive” makes the audience clap. There’s some things you don’t ever heal from. If you have the death of a child, if your kid dies, you’re never gonna heal from it. If your soul mate dies, you will never heal from it, I can guarantee you of that. You retain holes, and it’s shocking, frankly, that the death of a loved one doesn’t kill us. I mean, I still marvel at the fact that I am not dead because Pighead died. I have no idea how that happens, but it does, and you go on living. And, you know, I ended up being happy. That’s how it is: You end up with holes and you navigate around them. It’s the same thing with forgiving, I think. There’s nothing to forgive in a sociopath like that. Forgive how? How do you forgive that? But what I do is I accept. I definitely accept what I have and don’t wish it another way and don’t try to position it in another way in my head. I don’t try to minimize what my father was, and by the same token I don’t try to make him worse than he was. But he was pretty bad, so that would be hard to do. And as a result, I’m happy. I’m happy in my life. I’m OK, I’m not crazy. I’m not someone who lives in the past. People are frequently surprised when they meet me. I think they expect some neurotic mess with chewed up fingernails, constantly making jokes, and I’m much more like their dentist. I have just this surgical kind of personality sometimes. My personality is very level and I’m not manic depressive. That’s why the depression I was in for two years writing about my father was so absolutely atypical of my personality. It was like my body was hurling me into this psychological space that I required to write it, and it was very strange. I was a little apprehensive because it wasn’t funny, and I felt, “God, am I branded now? Readers are gonna expect me to be funny.” So that’s why I asked my designer, Chip Kidd, who does my jackets, I said, “This needs to instantly telegraph that something is completely different. It needs to be terrifying. There can be no mistaking that this is not funny when you see the jacket.” And he just immediately had this brilliant idea. I love the cover of the book. It’s one of the best covers of the last couple years, and that’s a lot because Chip does a lot of covers and they’re just astonishing. So I didn’t let that stop me from writing the book. I knew the book couldn’t be written any other way. It would be disingenuous to make it funny. That would have been a fake memoir, so I made it brutal. What’s been great is that the reception has been absolutely incredible all over the country. It’s by far my best selling book ever in hardcover. Kids are buying this thing up. They are buying one and two and three copies of it. It’s heartbreaking, but they’re saying, “My father was the same way.” Lots of guys are buying it and saying, “My father was the same way.” It’s not just teenagers—lots of adults, lots of women. It’s just a big range of people. What’s interesting to me is that, at this stage in the tour, midway through it, people have already read the book by the time I get to their city, so I start to hear feedback, and it’s always amazing, again, to hear “Me too, me too, me too,” from all these people. When I went to the store looking for books about difficult relationships between fathers and sons, there weren’t any of those books. It’s all Norman Rockwelly and advice form a dad to his boy and sports books. That wasn’t my life and that doesn’t reflect, I think, the lives of a lot of men. The fact that one third of all women will be raped or abused by their husbands or will report being raped or abused or beaten by their husbands during their lifetime tells you that there are a lot of bad guys out there. There are a lot of bad husbands. I mean, every day husbands leave their wives. They abandon the family. Every day husbands get drunk and they gamble away all the money. Every day fathers rape their children, every day fathers beat their children and do horrible things. It’s ugly and no one wants to talk about it, but it is a reality. And why aren’t there memoirs about that? That’s what I felt. It made me feel like even more of a freak with this father not to see these memoirs, to see only these positive, male-bonding, towel-snapping-in-the-locker-room kinds of books. What I have found is what I suspected: that I wasn’t alone.

You talk about how depressed you got writing the book. When you do readings from the book, does that depression surface again?

Not at all, no. Once the book is done and I’ve done the audio book, it doesn’t affect me.

Do you enjoy doing readings or would you rather be at home writing?

I definitely enjoy doing readings. I enjoy meeting the people who come to the readings. That’s the part of it that I love. I love the exchange, even though it’s quick, the signing and the meeting of people.

Looking ahead, you’ve covered so much of your life in memoirs, do you see yourself continuing to write autobiographical material or do you think you’ll dive more into pure fiction?

Well, I’ll always write about myself, always. It’s just a matter of how much of it will I publish. I’m working on a collection of holiday stories—funny, horrible holiday stories. I’ve always loved the holidays, but every single one has been a nightmare, including my last two as an adult, so it’s funny, horrible holiday stories called “You Better Not Cry.” I’m also working now on two novels. I’ve actually written three novels, I’ve only published my first. So this will be my fourth and fifth novel that I’ve written. It’s exciting. I love fiction. I love creating that world and it becomes more real to me than the actual world beyond my computer. So I look forward to writing fiction and novels.