Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Bestselling author Augusten Burroughs has built a fabulous career on his troubled childhood. Would it matter if he made it up?
Nov 11, 2005 | When it comes to milking fame out of a life story, few navel-gazers have been as successful as Augusten Burroughs. For close to 100 weeks, his 2002 memoir "Running With Scissors" has been sitting on the New York Times bestseller list, alongside longtime bestsellers from fellow memoirists Dave Pelzer ("A Child Called It") and David Sedaris ("Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"). Next year, a long-awaited film version of "Scissors" starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Annette Bening will hit the big screen, and an earlier Burroughs book, the novel "Sellevision," is also being made into a movie.
Although he's only 40, Burroughs' life story seems to contain no end of salable anecdotes: After "Scissors," he published the follow-up memoir "Dry" (2003) and a collection of personal essays, "Magical Thinking" (2004); he writes a monthly autobiographical column for Details (his writing has also appeared in Salon) and frequently contributes to NPR's "Morning Edition." According to his Web site -- a vision of salesmanship that helpfully reminds you on every page that Burroughs is a "#1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR" -- he's also working on a collection of essays and a holiday book. All of this would be only vaguely interesting if Burroughs were regarded as simply a wildly popular mass-market hack. But Burroughs' memoirs consistently generate glowing reviews and flattering comparisons to David Sedaris' work. And yet, he is a terrible writer.
To say that Burroughs is a writer akin to Sedaris is so befuddlingly off-course that the suggestion smacks of sheer laziness, akin to the tired P.R. game that creates suspect book-jacket blurbs (for "Joycean," read "long-winded and obscure") and overzealous movie marquees (If you liked "Some Like It Hot," you'll LOVE "White Chicks"!!!). And to proclaim that Burroughs and Sedaris should share a fan base suggests that literary merit has nothing to do with craft, that a tenuous similarity of substance -- both writers trade in autobiography and humor -- trumps the quality of the writing.
Sedaris' essays are careful constructions of artful manipulation; like a good composer, he understands that where you place the notes is as important as what notes you use, and he perfectly times his tricks -- the witty one-liner; the more expansive, subtle joke; the somber, introspective moment that tugs out your heart. Not so for Augusten Burroughs. His narratives are shapeless lumps of clichid sentiments, boring dialogue and tortured metaphors. As an authorial voice, Burroughs has a third-grader's wit and the introspective wisdom of a stone; as a crafter of stories, he possesses an ear for tone and pitch as flat as William Hung's. Still, this lack of literary flair doesn't bother many readers. Stories of sex, abuse, valium overdoses and bizarre spiritual beliefs offer us an opportunity to gawk at a grisly scene, to make us feel glad our childhoods weren't that bad, and to warm the cockles of our hearts with what is, ultimately, a happy-ending story about overcoming adversity.
But how does Burroughs snow the critics? For one thing, to pick on the memoir of a junior-high dropout, one who claims not to have read a book until he was 24, might feel downright mean. Burroughs positions himself in his books as a victim -- of parental neglect, of a pedophile's advances, of alcoholism -- pleading for a little kindness, and it seems likely that many otherwise-shrewd critics have willfully overlooked his books' flaws and extended the hand of friendship out of sheer pity. Yet there are glimpses of a secret dislike, snippets of doubt, in otherwise positive reviews of "Scissors." In the New York Times, Janet Maslin conceded that the book "slips occasionally into hackneyed territory"; Virginia Heffernan, in her Times review, admitted that it "lack[s] the fire and art that make literature different from life"; Stephen J. Lyons wrote in the Boston Herald that in "Scissors," "the writing advice 'show, don't tell' is taken too literally." But it's one thing to personally forgive Burroughs for writing like an adolescent, another to lower the bar on writing altogether -- especially when it comes to a genre that, like fiction, relies on critics to uphold a meritocracy that the marketplace ignores.
This critical charity, like that of readers, is based on the idea that Burroughs' books are completely true, a concern that has also occasionally cropped up in reviews and then been quickly paved over. "Can you, reader, suspend disbelief?" Virginia Heffernan archly asked, before succumbing to pity: "But let's not inflict more therapy on Burroughs." That the question still lingers says something about the vulnerability of Burroughs' work. Disbelief isn't an issue in Sedaris' essays; one suspects that the underlying true-story details have been filed down and rearranged anyway, to create something better than true, something that's qualifiably art. If it turned out that Sedaris had, say, never worked as a Christmas elf at Macy's, "Santaland Diaries" would still make great fiction, because it is charming and funny and well-crafted. Burroughs' work, on the other hand, resembles less a mosaic construction than a coughed-up hairball: It's gross, primitive and smacks of something that needed to be released for the creator's own health, but really shouldn't have been shared with others. As dismal as his writing is as memoir, it would make for unforgivably awful, boring fiction that no one would bother to read, much less recommend.
So imagine this: What if Burroughs made it all up? What if he isn't the train wreck, the victim, the innocent bystander who overcame the odds? In late July, the surviving members of the family with whom Burroughs once lived, and who gave him the fucked-up childhood he writes about in "Scissors," filed a lawsuit against him alleging defamation, fraud, emotional distress and invasion of privacy. The Turcottes are claiming that most of "Scissors" is composed of Burroughs' "own bizarre, imagined scenarios and exaggerated descriptions," and, in addition to seeking unspecified monetary damages, they're asking that the book be reclassified as fiction.
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