My guest today, Augustin Burroughs, is the author of a series of novels and incredibly transparent, funny, provocative memoirs, including running with Scissors, which is the story of his early upbringing after his mom, who was dealing with mental illness and other things, ended up dropping him at the house of a local psychiatrist to be raised in what he depicts as a kind of wildly untraditional and at times abusive household.
That book became a massive bestseller and a movie back in 2006, starring people like Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin, Evan Rachel Wood.
And along the way, he's continued to write.
And when asked if there was anything he was holding back because he's known as being so transparent, so real, so open, he'd always answer no.
But in his latest book, toil and trouble, we learn there was, in fact, a very, very big and deep secret that he had been keeping to himself for his entire life, one that was central to his identity.
And it was time for it to finally come out.
He didn't mean for it to happen.
It literally just started channeling through his fingers into the computer, which he described as essentially destroying while writing this in such haste.
In today's conversation, we explore Augustine's upbringing, his early career in advertising, which is kind of amazing, considering he actually kind of stopped his education in primary school, his descent into addiction for a lot of years, and then the moment that would pull him out of it and send him back into the world of writing and the career and the life that he has now.
So excited to share this with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
Very often when I sit down with somebody who's written a memoir, sort of like the story of their life.
You've written memoir, but you've written memoirs, plural, that tend to really focus in and zero in on almost like, seasons of your life.
And it's been interesting also because you haven't done it chronologically as well.
It wasn't like, I'm going to start in the beginning and then slowly work my way up to the present.
Right.
But the early years, I mean, I think, have been pretty well documented by you, involved you, Northampton, a dad who was a professor, philosophy, and also, as you've written, a distant man.
Yeah.
Is that putting it mildly?
Yeah.