Sharing your life with the world can be a difficult choice, but for Augusten Burroughs, it paid off in multiple nonfiction books and memoirs. This Saturday at 5 p.m., Square Books will host Burroughs, best known for his book “Running With Scissors.”
This weekend, however, he will be presenting his recently-released and most recent memoir: “Lust and Wonder.”
“’Lust and Wonder’ is about three relationships I had during the time that I got sober, from around 1999 to almost present time,” Burroughs said. “I hadn’t consciously meant to make a sequel to ‘Dry,’ but that was the next big stage of my life. I stopped drinking, started writing, and thought I’d start making better decisions. That is not what happened. My decisions got chaotic. I was having to tell myself to be happy.”
“Lust and Wonder,” the story of these chaotic decisions and their consequences, was released Tuesday, March 29. It features several men with whom Burroughs had notable relationships while living in New York City. One of these was a man named Dennis, whose relationship with Burroughs went on for nearly 10 years, caused a great amount of unhappy compromise in Burroughs’ life. On a more uplifting note, the book ends starring Christopher, the man who goes on to be Burroughs’ husband.
“Writing about my relationships was hard, in a sense, because, intellectually, I set out to write fiction,” Burroughs said. “I told my publisher I’d send them a novel. But I didn’t love the fiction I wrote, I was starting to feel blocked and one of my friends suggested I write about what happened after I was sober.”
Burroughs said it is hard to please all readers.
“Memoirs are not beauty contests,” he said. “There are people who are going to hate every word and there are people who are going to hang on every word and just love it. And it’s upsetting to write about a relationship that went on for 10 years and that wasn’t good. But with me, when writing memoirs, I can go back in my mind to highly specific times and use that. It’s like rediscovering a moment on the page, like a time capsule. The act of writing is therapeutic. It’s a place to park your mind. It’s the art of losing yourself in time.”
With numerous bestsellers already under his belt and “Lust and Wonder” hitting the shelves this week, Burroughs clearly has a grasp on the business of writing.
“I’ve been through Mississippi and we’ve not had a book tour here before, so I’m really, really excited,” he said.
