Augusten Burroughs Solves Your Writer's Block Forever

Running With Scissors author Augusten Burroughs gives an on-camera interview in which he reveals his secret writing process to the world. He works in bed! Gets up, showers, gets dressed, walks the dog, makes the bed, then gets back in bed. Weird. More importantly, he shares his simple and foolproof solution to overcoming writer's block. Hint: "It's like dropping a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets into water. Fizz!...If you want to find out how powerful the storm is, fly the plane into the eye of the storm!" Okay! The revelatory video is below: More »

Augusten Burroughs' Dad The Rashomon of Abusive Fathers

Chronicler of every single moment of his life Augusten Burroughs is back with yet another memoir, this one titled A Wolf At the Table. Despite his marvelous success as an humorist and essayist, his latest 'oir hinges on the darker tales of his late father John Robison, a popular professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who by all accounts wasn't the kindest patriarch to his wife and children. That Robison is a complicated and troubled man isn't in dispute. What is up for debate in this Times piece are certain episodes of what Burroughs calls "stunning psychological cruelty." For example, the book claims Robison put a cigarette out on Burroughs' forehead. The surviving members of the Robison family also have divergent memories of a scene from A Wolf At the Table in which Burroughs defends himself and his brother John Elder Robison from their father with a BB gun. After the jump, the two sons and their mother relate three different versions of the same sad tale. More »

Fuck The Bullshit, It's Time To Throw James Frey Down

"James Frey is a liar. His best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is a fraud. It is a seamless mass of falsehoods, told deliberately, for the purpose of making money." Back when Tom Scocca wrote those words in the Observer last January, it was nearly impossible to imagine the disgraced memoirist would ever sell another book to a major U.S. publisher. Sure, he'd have little tossed-off pieces in magazines every once in a while, or maybe he'd go back to writing screenplays. Hollywood doesn't care about this kind of thing! But the idea that Frey would sell what amounts to his third novel, for more than a million dollars, to Harper's Jonathan Burnham, seemed as unlikely as, say, Ron Goldman's family pimping a book by O.J. Simpson. And then it happened. A lot of things happen that shouldn't. More »

Augusten Burroughs' Publisher Calls His Defeat A Victory

Are the publicists at St. Martins Press expert spinmeisters, or are they obfuscatemeisters like their author Augusten Burroughs? That's what we're wondering after reading the press release they distributed this morning about the settlement of the Turcotte family's lawsuit against Burroughs, which, as the AP reported, will result in the reclassification of the book "as a 'book' rather than 'memoirs.'" But St. Martins Press disagrees, or lies, or something, though. More »

Augusten Burroughs' Brother Sells Memoir

Non-fiction: Memoir: John Elder Robison's memoir of growing up with Asperger's Syndrome and emerging as a fully-realized adult, with a foreword by Robison's brother, Augusten Burroughs, to Rachel Klayman at Crown, in a pre-empt, in a major deal, reportedly for $1.1 million (NY Post dollars), by Christopher Schelling at Ralph M. Vicinanza (world).

Just what the world aches to read: more information about Augusten Burroughs' childhood! Well coattailed! We can't wait for the Vanity Fair article about all the people whose lives get ruined by this one. Maybe one of those lives will be Augusten's this time? (And will they call it "Running with Autism"?) More »

Augusten Burroughs to Join Fake Writer Club

"Sure, A Million Little Pieces author James Frey is a fraud, but Augusten Burroughs is an even bigger phony." Ouch! What could have possibly spawned such a cutting remark about that scamp Burroughs? Why, a little Fake Writerness, of course! More »

Remainders: Remembering Katie Couric's Memory-Filled Farewell

• We really don't want today to end, if only so that everyone can continue to hyper-analyze Katie Couric's insane farewell on the Today show. [BWE] More »