Augusten Burroughs
Burroughs Talks Running with Scissors
“I actually had anxiety that it would be
boring,” said Burroughs. “I remember reading, after it was typeset,
going through the galleys, reading it a few times, thinking, ‘Why
is anyone going to even care about this?’ And my agent had to be the
one to tell me, ‘Look, most people have never experienced anything
like this. It’s going to be very unusual to other people.’ So
I had to trust him on that.”
Now the memoir is a film. “It was very fun, it was bizarre, it was
surreal. It’s just out of our normal daily experience to see a movie
of your life while you’re still in the middle of living it. It’s
just a very odd experience. The one thing I wasn’t prepared for was
to be so emotionally impacted by the film when I saw it. I mean I was relieved
first that it didn’t suck. You know, there was this sort of, ‘Oh
good, it’s not horrible.’ But then to be so emotionally affected
by it was surprising because I had gone through it once and then wrote about
it and did a book tour, so I just didn’t expect that. I just felt
like it wouldn’t affect me emotionally but it did and I was very happy
and relieved. I feel very good that there’s a document. Part of me
has always felt what’s the point of going through such a life if no
one ever knows and no one ever cares? Now I feel like at least it exists
as a movie. So in that sense it was a profound relief.”
The doctor who treated Burroughs’ mother has since been discredited,
and advances in the field of psychiatry have led to healthier understandings
of mental conditions. “I also think there are a lot of very good therapists
out there. In my particular case, it was a bit of the blind leading the
blinder. It’s hard for me to generalize though. One thing I can tell
you is that from traveling around the world for this book, the one thing
I’ve learned is that there are so many people who have had the exact
same childhood and there’s another layer of people who have had not
the exact same childhood but felt the same feelings that childhood brought
up. But I’ve learned that my childhood is not as unique as I thought
it was. I really thought I was the only person who had anything remotely
like this, but it’s not the case. There are a lot of people that went
through that. I think that there was a lot of enabling as you say. There
was definitely a lot of enabling and I guess that certainly goes on now
otherwise there wouldn’t be a successful therapy community training
people out of that behavior.”
As for those who debate the validity of psychiatry today, Burroughs has
living field of the practice’s legitimacy. “I know there is
such a thing as a chemical imbalance because my mother used to go psychotic
every single year, sometimes once, sometimes twice, but every year and in
the fall she would go psychotic, and I’ve seen it first hand and I
know what it looks like, and then she had a stroke and it never happened
again. So I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes.”
The film’s director, Ryan Murphy, told Canmag that Burroughs had stories
far worse than what he included in the book. Burroughs explained his self-censorship.
“I wanted the book to be read and in order for that to happen, I wanted
to focus on what was funny or came off funny to me. Not everyone thinks
Running with Scissors is funny. But I focused on the stories
that I liked, the things that were funny for me. And there were things I
just didn’t want to write about and there were stories that didn’t
feel like they were mine. They weren’t directly my stories. They were
more other people’s stories so I didn’t feel like writing them
because they weren’t mine. They weren’t specifically mine.”
Running with Scissors opens this Friday, October
20th.
Stay tuned for updates.
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