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Running with Memory: An Interview with Augusten Burroughsby Kilian MelloyTuesday Nov 17, 2009 Augusten Burroughs offers piss-yourself-funny stories and tenderly moving mini-memoirs in his new collection of Christmas-themed essays, You Better Not Cry. From childhood memories of badgering his parents into giving him decent presents, and biting off a life-sized Santa’s waxen face in an early mixture of sexual arousal and primal hunger, to episodes of communing with the homeless in New York’s wintry Yuletide streets, or sharing a first Christmas with a great love, Burroughs warms--and sometimes--breaks the heart. He certainly shatters the funny bone.
It’s a sunny and warm November afternoon in Boston when EDGE meets with Burroughs for an interview. The writer--who reckons that he’s had "a lot of strange experiences, but I’m not particularly kooky"--barely hears the first question through before he’s off and running, mind sparking like a Catherine Wheel as he devours one piece of nicotine gum after the next. His thoughts range from the inner mysteries of the mind--including his own, which seems to operate a little differently from most of us--to the furthest reaches of space and time. Burroughs, it turns out, is an aficionado of cosmology, the study of the origins and nature of the universe.
We begin with a simple question, germane enough to the subject of the book’s 11 essays. Why, EDGE asks, is Christmas such a fraught holiday?
"It’s a very odd holiday in that sense," Burroughs reckons. "For kids that are brought up with Christmas, they are taught the myth of St. Nicholas and the elves. They are taught that myth very young, even if they are brought up in a very religious family."
That distinction is not simply Burroughs meandering: it forms a crucial part of one of the book’s funniest episodes, when his religious grandmother is shocked to discover that a young Augusten has mistaken Saint Nick for Jesus.
Continues the memoirist, "For most kids, it’s the very first big thing they learn about the world that their parents sit them down and tell them. The parents make a big deal about it every year. Now, your parents are the very people who give you food, so your trust for them is the warp and the weft [of your world]. Because we are very young maybe three or four [when we hear about Santa], it’s a very large percentage of our world--and then we learn it’s not real. It’s fake.
"So I think to find out that it’s not real, whatever that is, subconsciously there’s a part of us that resists that because we learned it so very young," Burroughs continues. "That ingrained thinking is very hard to unlearn."
Chewing his nicotine gum furiously, Burroughs adds, "I’ll bet people react to that [revelation of Santa as a fiction] all kinds of different ways. People standing outside in New York to go watch the tree lit... nothing’s really going to happen when that tree is lit. It’s going to have lights on it that you can see any time, but people still go and do it, In the back of one’s mind, people kind of have a belief that maybe there is some magic, even if they don’t believe in a fat man in a suit."
Continues Burroughs, "It may not be so much a belief as it is a feeling that that day weights more than the other days, it has more weight... in the chest..."
EDGE suggests that Christmas, as loaded as it is with stress and angst, is nonetheless a day we set aside for enchantment and sentiment. Burroughs agrees, "We do--and we kind of force the issue. It’s fascinating--we all know that it’s crass commercialism, it’s a pain in the ass, we know that. It’s not news and it doesn’t matter. People complain, but they’ll do it anyway--complaining’s part of it.
For himself, the gift giving isn’t so important. "It’s not that component that I care for," says Burroughs. "As a child, it was simple--it was like I was a goat who saw a shiny can glinting in the sun and I’d never look away. And even when it was moved, I would stamp my foot and still stare at the same spot. That’s more what it was--that’s what I liked about it, the lights it’s the same stuff that I liked about variety shows and the Oscars, all the stuff I hate now--the lights, the sparkly curtains, which I knew was a set, but I loved even more for it. And I also felt like it was a payday for me for putting up with those parents."
Indeed, Burroughs wrote an essay about that very sentiment, and it’s one of the book’s funniest.
But that comedy is laced with darkness, as are all of Burrough’s memoirs, most especially his last book, A Wolf at the Table, which focuses on his father. But Burrough’s dad had a soft spot for Christmas, he tells EDGE. "That’s why I was even able to see it as any kind of a payday because he was horribly cheap, but he would buy things for Christmas," Burroughs recalls. "He was less of a threat during the holidays because he was heavily occupied with it. He would sit and look at the tree. He was never sinister during the holidays. He was very sinister the rest of the time."
Sinister? "I don’t think he could experience emotion or other people directly," explains the memoirist. "He may have just had Asperger’s Syndrome, it could have been that simple, and he was an alcoholic--but I think he was a sociopath," Burroughs adds, going on to muse, "I think he had a much darker side. I don’t think it was Asperger’s, because my brother has Asperger’s. There was a very boundless cruelty in him--he enjoyed it, he enjoyed frightening [people]. But not during the holidays."
Next: The Nature of Memoir--and Memory
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