In an AP story out this week, Augusten Burroughs explains why he continues to write memoirs and would never have turned his life story into a novel, as some have suggested.
At the Dallas Museum of Art on Friday, novelist Brock Clarke took the exact same argument from the opposite side, telling why he'd never write a memoir (I'd love to see Burroughs and Clarke in an actual debate).
Mr. Clarke, who wrote An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, a hilarious, dead-on satire of memoirs, gave these reasons for preferring to incorporate his relatives and memories through fiction rather than memor:
1) "It [a memoir] would have been boring." None of his relatives have been abused or abusers, addicted or alcoholic, tormented by religion or prone to tormenting others through religion, he noted, rendering them distinctly un-memoirable.
2) "I wouldn't be able to stop myself from making stuff up."
3) "I didn't want to dig around in my grandparents' past, not because I'm lazy, but because it's none of my [expletive] business."
The AP story about Mr. Burroughs follows.
NEW YORK -- On the book tour for A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father, Augusten Burroughs is ready for the skeptics.
The Running With Scissors author is the first to broach the subject, mockingly referring to himself as a "fake memoirist."
"As one of the leading fake memoirists," he said. "I constantly get asked how do you remember scenes and dialogue from when you were 15 or 13? And I'm amazed by that question, because I think, 'Well, how can you not?'"
In person, Mr. Burroughs, 42, who was born Christopher Robison, speaks in the disarmingly frank and funny voice in which he writes. If he's also slightly defensive, that's understandable. The media coverage of his latest memoir, A Wolf at the Table, has been skeptical about its accuracy.
"It would be easier for me, certainly, to have written A Wolf at the Table and called it a novel and avoided all these questions, but I will never do that, ever," Mr. Burroughs says. "I have to write what I have to write, even if it's harder, you know. Even if it's tougher and makes my job tougher and I have to answer the same questions and defend myself endlessly, I'll do it."
The book is a departure in almost every way from Running With Scissors, the uproarious account of his bizarre adolescence, which made him a best-selling author and a celebrity. His trademark brand of off-color humor is gone. There's nothing funny about his story of living with a father he describes as a sociopath.
The family portrayed in Running With Scissors filed a lawsuit, claiming that many of the most memorable scenes were either embellished or invented. The case was settled last year. Under the terms, which were not disclosed, he changed language in the acknowledgment, but as he points out, "Not one word of that memoir was changed. It remains a memoir."
He says, "I think it's been good that the media has sort of rooted out, like truffle hogs, the fake memoirists. And those of us who are not, who are actually just trying to tell our truths, need to stand up and continue to write memoir and not be intimidated and pushed into the closet, so to speak."
Kristen A. Lee,
The Associated Press
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