One Last Secret | Augusten Burroughs
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2019
⏱️ 89 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Augusten Burroughs knows how to keep a secret. An autodidact with no formal education (https://www.augusten.com/) beyond elementary school, he began working as a copywriter in his late teens and spent 18 years creating global ad campaigns. Behind the scenes, though, he was falling apart, an alcoholic, harboring the effects of what he describes as a wildly-chaotic, abusive and destructive childhood that he'd eventually detail in the massive New York Times bestseller-turned major motion picture, Running With Scissors (https://amzn.to/2qkxRus).
He's since written numerous follow-on memoirs and novels, and crafted a life as a successful writer. But, there was one area Augusten never told anyone about, even his husband. Until one day, it literally came bursting onto the page. It was time to "come clean" with this one final, and deeply-provocative part of himself, detailed in his new memoir, Toil & Trouble (https://amzn.to/32mSkNk). In today's conversation, we unwrap the layers that led Augusten from a traumatic childhood through to his wild successes, the life-saving role that writing played in his recovery from alcoholism, what it’s like to navigate the world with atypical sensitivities, and finding the gift among the unfixable things in life.
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Transcript
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| 0:58.5 | My guest today Augustine borrows is the author of a series of novels and incredibly transparent, |
| 1:10.4 | funny, provocative memoirs including running with scissors, which is the story of his early |
| 1:17.2 | upbringing after his mom who was dealing with mental illness and other things ended up dropping |
| 1:21.8 | him at the house of a local psychiatrist to be raised in what he depicts as a kind of a |
| 1:26.3 | wildly untraditional and at times abusive household. That book became a massive bestseller |
| 1:32.7 | and a movie back in 2006, starting people like Annette Benning and Alec Baldwin and Evan |
| 1:38.3 | Rachel Wood. And along the way he's continued to write and when asked if there was anything |
| 1:44.9 | he was holding back because he's known as being so transparent, so real, so open, he'd |
| 1:50.2 | always answer no. But in his latest book, Toilet and Trouble, we learned there was in fact |
| 1:56.3 | a very, very big and deep secret that he had been keeping to himself for his entire life, |
... |
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