Augusten Burroughs: Escape from the madhouse

Augusten Burroughs survived a childhood from hell to become a tough and funny chronicler of his life and times. Christina Patterson meets a wit with a heart

Augusten Burroughs is big in the Bible Belt. Surprising, you might think, for a writer whose bestselling memoir, Running with Scissors, includes graphic accounts of blow-jobs with a paedophile and of his mother's cunnilingus with the vicar's wife. "I get e-mails from people," he confides, "saying 'I've got to change the covers of the books when I read them round the house, because my husband wouldn't want to see me reading it'. And then," he adds, "I get e-mails from husbands saying exactly the same thing."

Augusten Burroughs is big in the Bible Belt. Surprising, you might think, for a writer whose bestselling memoir, Running with Scissors, includes graphic accounts of blow-jobs with a paedophile and of his mother's cunnilingus with the vicar's wife. "I get e-mails from people," he confides, "saying 'I've got to change the covers of the books when I read them round the house, because my husband wouldn't want to see me reading it'. And then," he adds, "I get e-mails from husbands saying exactly the same thing."

Burroughs appears unfazed by his surprising fan base. But then he is unfazed by most things. His father was an alcoholic academic who looked like "a dried mackerel that could stand upright and wear tweed", his mother a suicidal unpublished poet who believed she was a genius. As the marriage edged towards mutual homicide, they sought help from a deranged psychiatrist, Dr Finch. On his first visit to the Finch home, Augusten was shocked by the squalor - and by the naked child defecating under the grand piano. A few days later, his mother announced that he would be moving in.

And so the rest of his childhood was spent in what can only be described as a madhouse, where Valium was popped like Opal fruits and boredom mitigated with a quick blast from the ancient ECT machine under the stairs. Augusten soon got used to the family trend for treating the turds in the toilet bowl as "messengers from heaven", and to the hours Dr Finch spent in his "masturbatorium". His own sexual awakening took place when he was 13, in an encounter with Finch's 33-year-old adoptive son. Their relationship (illegal, of course) lasted for years.

Throughout these chaotic years, Augusten clung to his dreams of a future as an airline steward, a soap star and a hairdresser. He emerged with a "PhD in survival", but not much else. "Jobs doing what?" he asks Finch's daughter, Nathalie at the end of Running with Scissors, when she suggests that they both find work to finance their fast-food habits. "Our only skills are oral sex and restraining agitated psychotics." It's a classic Burroughs one-liner, a symptom of the wise-cracking wit that comes not from creative-writing school but, you feel, from the self-protective impulse of a child determined to survive.

"From as early as I can remember," says Burroughs, "my life was very ugly, and I was somehow very aware that it didn't have to be that way. As soon as I was old enough, it was going to be a good life, so I was always extremely optimistic. And in order to be that way I've had to look at a situation that's very bleak, or very actively ugly, and find out what was funny about it. It's almost like a mental game," he adds, his little twitch of the jaw a reminder of the nervous energy that still drives him, "sort of like checking for blackheads on the faces of terrorists."

The tone of the book, not unlike the tone of Burroughs's conversation now, is deadpan: a popular American literary trope, but also an accurate reflection of a child who learns to adapt to the madness around him. It is also a narrative entirely without self-pity. "I have my mother to thank for that," he explains. "All my life, my memories were of my mother rooting in her past, of how she was a victim, of how her mother stifled her creatively or neglected her emotionally. My mother's self-pity embarrassed me. I can't even express to you how humiliating or embarrassing and dirty I felt her self-pity was, and I went in the other direction. So I don't ever blame the world or any external source". I didn't," he adds, "become an alcoholic because of my childhood, it was an absolute choice."

Perhaps not, but it's hardly a surprising turn of events for a young man with a start like this. At 19, and now in advertising, Burroughs was knocking back a bottle of spirits a night. Forced by his employers into rehab, he embarked on a new life of fluorescent-lit group therapy, "McFish thing" lunches on red plastic trays and end-of-session pick-me-ups with stuffed animals. It provided the material for his second bestselling memoir, Dry - amazingly, as funny and moving as his first. It was during this time that he wrote his first novel, Sellevision, which will be published in this country next year.

"I wrote it in seven days," he announces, "and I was coming down from alcohol poisoning. I drank for the first three days, and I couldn't drink on the fourth day because it was in the way. I was sitting in this apartment, which is literally no bigger than this room," he says, gesturing around the cosy hotel sitting-room where we're sipping our tea, "and I had a little cheap desk, and a chair and my computer. And just imagine the thousands of bottles and the sheets! I had one set of sheets, which I never changed, and I used to wet the bed when I was drunk. It was just disgustingly vile. But after I finished Sellevision, I was happy, sitting in my little nest. I realised that I was going to be a writer and I would be published. I would be devoted completely to the task of getting published. Not rich. Not world famous. But published."

His confidence proved justified. Running with Scissors was a near-instant bestseller. Burroughs was not surprised. He had, after all, decided that it would be. In his new collection of essays, Magical Thinking (Atlantic, £9.99), he offers this as an example of his ability to "control the world with my mind" - the gift, in fact, that gave the book its title. The tone is deadpan, as usual, but the epigraph - a definition of magical thinking as "a schizotypal personality disorder" - offers a clue that all is not as it seems.

The Burroughs in the books is a creature entirely solipsistic and self-obsessed. He "feels certain that conjoined twins are born so that they can be profiled on the Discovery Channel and watched by me", and cheerfully admits to a "wide, deep, cruel streak". Of the examples of this offered, two stand out. The first is his (hilarious) account of finding, torturing and finally killing a "rat thing" in his bathroom. The second is his tale of a toddler, whose hand he stepped on in a shop and nearly crushed. When the little girl screamed with pain, Burroughs laughed and "slid away".

The Augusten Burroughs sitting opposite me, however, is attentive, polite and, yes, kind. Two weeks before the publication of Running with Scissors, he was still downloading applications to community colleges to train as a paramedic or a nurse. "I wanted to work with people who were dying," he tells me, "people who had cancer or burns." Clearly, I tell him, gasping, there is quite a gap between the literary persona and the real flesh-and-blood.

"Sometimes I go for the things that make me laugh," he agrees; "they're a little more on the surface; they're nastier. You know what's interesting? At Rhode Island I started off reading 'Rat Thing', and the audience was horrified by it. I realised it's because some of my work you can't read in public, because it will make you laugh, but you'll never admit that you laughed to it."

"Like transsexual post-surgical vaginas?" I ask, taking up another one of his themes.

Burroughs nods energetically. "When people are alone in their room and they're reading about a transsexual and a post-surgical vagina," he declares, "they're fascinated."

The magical thinking itself is, he admits, "tongue in cheek". But, he adds, "I do believe in the power of every individual's ability to will for themselves and create a better life. I've gotten everything I've ever wanted in life. It sounds like a horribly arrogant thing to say, but it's true."

It is also, you can't help thinking, extremely well deserved. Now nearly 40, Burroughs has found not just fame and fortune, but the domestic stability he always craved. He lives with his partner, Dennis, in a beautiful house in the town in Western Massachusetts where he grew up. His brother lives next door and his nephew comes round every day. A life redeemed, perhaps? "Yeah," he says with another twitch of that jaw, "it's the great recycling programme".

And soon there will be the movie of his life, too. Running with Scissors is currently in its sixth week of filming, starring Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brian Cox. "It's a closed set," says Burroughs, "but apparently, during some of the scenes, half the crew - all hardened union men - are crying. I worry about seeing it myself," he confides, "because I know I'm going to be choked up."

Biography: Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up in Western Massachusetts. When he was 13, his mother gave him away to her psychiatrist. His chaotic years in Dr Finch's household provided the material for his first bestselling memoir, Running with Scissors, currently being made into a film by Ryan Murphy, with Gwyneth Paltrow. It was followed by Dry, an account of his life as an alcoholic advertising executive and enforced spell in rehab. His collection of essays, Magical Thinking (Atlantic, £9.99), is published in the UK this week. Augusten Burroughs divides his time between New York and western Massachusetts, where he lives with his partner, Dennis, and two bulldogs.