Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [78]
In the end, I wound up somewhere in the middle.
While not famous on the same level as Gwyneth Paltrow or even Monica Lewinsky, I am more known than I would have been had I chosen a more Ted Kaczynski life (unless, of course, I had mailed the exploding envelopes).
I wrote a novel called Sellevision. It was published and reviewed by a few newspapers and magazines, and then slid quietly from the shelf, as though it had been a particularly vivid delusion instead of an actual publication.
But then two years later I wrote a memoir, and suddenly my face was on the masthead of USA Today. My embarrassing past made news in papers and magazines here and in Europe.
But while all of this was happening, I was still home in my apartment with Dennis and our dog, Bentley, sitting at my computer and writing, like always. Nothing had changed except that I now gave interviews and posed for pictures which I hoped looked better than the actual me. I still didn’t go to literary parties or art gallery openings. I didn’t suddenly have a posse of fashionable friends with famous last names. I continued to wear the same dog-hair–covered sweatpants around the house for two weeks at a time.
Of course, writer famous isn’t like movie famous. Movies are consumed in public, along with hundreds of other people, and the actor’s face is enlarged to the size of a minivan. And watching movies is the only thing besides sleeping and having sex that we do in the dark, so there’s that intimacy. On screen, each breath is magnified, so it feels like it’s on our own neck. Then we leave the theater and talk about the movie, obsess over the stars. We see their pictures on TV and in magazines and online. And as a result of this saturation, we would recognize Brad Pitt in a bathing suit before we would recognize our own aunt in one.
Books, on the other hand, are read by individuals in bathtubs, beds, on toilets. Always in solitude. And the author’s face is only seen if the reader turns to the back of the book and looks at the jacket picture. Or, if a newspaper or magazine happens to print the author’s photo. This happened to me a few times, and when I left the apartment, sometimes I was recognized.
Because my memoir was extremely confessional and contained scenes that were both mortifying and humiliating, people automatically feel comfortable approaching me in public and confessing their innermost secrets.
“Aren’t you Augusten Burroughs?” one grandmother asked me outside Fairway Market.
She was a nice-looking old lady, dressed well in a tailored brown suit. She had a good haircut. Her makeup was of a modern palate. She was exactly the sort of grandmother I would like to have had. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “That would be me.”
She smiled and crossed her arms. The handle of her little black purse fell into the crook of her elbow. “Well, I just loved your book,” she said.
Somebody’s grandmother read my book! Not just some gay guy from West Orange, New Jersey, “Thank you so much,” I said. “I really appreciate that.” I needed to get inside the store because Dennis was at home waiting for his goat cheese. But I couldn’t rush the old lady, especially when she was lavishing me with praise.
“You know,” she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice to a conspirational whisper. “When I was a little girl my mother used to give me enemas with Dr Pepper. And then make me drink the liquid when it came out!”
Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face. This is the sort of detail you don’t reveal to anybody, even a therapist. You simply avoid Dr Pepper and take your dirty little secret to the grave with you. I said, “Did she?”
“Oh yes,” said the old lady. “She was a wicked woman. And let me tell you, to this day I cannot drink Dr Pepper. If I even catch a whiff of it, my sphincter tightens up into a little knot.”
It was such a visual set of words.
“Well, that’s just an incredible story. And it was so nice to meet you. But I’m running late and need to pick something up inside the store.