It gave me a chance to finish the book, though.
Thanks for getting through it!

Another memoir, eh? What’s next: one about a long-lost sadist Nazi-Eskimo cousin of yours?
[Laughs] Horrible abuse at the hands of a devil worshipper? I don’t know why I feel the need to write memoirs: It probably stems from my father and that feeling of being invisible. I’m probably going to turn to fiction next. As much as I enjoy writing about my life, I know the end of every story before I even sit down. With fiction, I have no idea what’s going to happen next. It’s like watching a movie.

This one is about your father. Why?
Well, my father would behave so strangely one minute and deny it the next. And he had this sort of persona that he showed the world, but he was very different with me. Much darker. I couldn’t write it when he was alive, though. I worried, as he was dying, that I would be hit with this wave of things that I had been in denial about, but that didn’t happen. I felt freedom and I got busy working.

I kept waiting for the punch lines as the book went on, and I was still waiting when I got through the last page. Where are all the laughs, friend?
[Laughs] “Where are all the laughs?,” I know. Before I started writing it, I knew it wasn’t going to be like the others. It wasn’t going to be a funny book. It’s funny, because I don’t think about and I never have thought about readers. My first book, Sellevision, was published, and I was paid $5 for it and it sold five copies and I was so happy. I was thrilled. I had the artifact, the book, and that’s all I cared about. Nothing would ever change that. It was great. Sales were never part of the equation. Running with Scissors—at the time, the books on the best-seller lists were all about dead Presidents, more serious books. This was sort of the Tuesdays with Morrie, and not some book about a 12-year-old getting it up the ass from some mental patient. Living with his lunatic psychiatrist. That’s just not a book that becomes a best-seller. Even though that book did become popular, my writing style never changed. I’ve always written the same, since I was a kid. When I started writing this new book, I have to admit that I did have some anxiety. I thought, Man, people are going to expect this to be funny. As soon as they see it, people will be smirking and waiting for the punch line. They’re going to be waiting for the joke and it’s not going to come, and they will say, “Man, he’s lost it. He’s so not funny anymore.” I realized, though, that I can’t worry about that. The book has to be what it is. Hopefully people will come with me for the ride. The other thing is that, the humor that comes in my other books, it’s more of a defense mechanism than anything else. The real sharpening of my humor didn’t happen until I was 12 or 13, when everything was turned upside down.

The kid in the new book seems kind of earnest…
Yeah, because it’s before all that happens. You can see the seed of it, but it was only later, when that earnestness was stripped away, that I had to focus. My life became a situation of almost small triage, where it was either, okay, slit your wrists and get this over with, or just focus on the turkey carcass on the floor. This book sort of predates the humor, but where germs of it formed.

Was your father legitimately sociopathic, or just playing games with you, as he noted in his diary?
I thought a lot about that. I guess I’ll never know for sure, but I believe that he was legitimately sociopathic. I’m not a specialist or anything though. What he had was this ability to construct this really successful façade, and he appeared to have no empathy at all, but he could look like he did. If you ask people who knew him professionally, they would just say that he was this nice Southern gentleman.

It was kind of like the wolf in that classic children’s story who dressed up like Grandma?
Yeah! Actually, I never thought about that, but that’s true. Exactly. So many years later, after he was no longer drinking and had been sober for maybe 20 years and was seemingly rehabilitated, I enacted a little plot. I suggested that old ladies fall off bridges every day, referring to my mother; he knew the exact number of windows from where people could witness it. It was just a really chilling moment that just confirmed things for me.

There was no hesitation on his part?
None at all. And he was very calm and speaking in a low voice. It was so disturbing to me, that he would let his guard down like that. That was confirmation for me that he was missing something that makes a person human. Yet if you met him, he seemed like a very nice man.

Was the psychological abuse worse than if he had just been a drunk who beat up on you?
Absolutely. If someone’s a drunk… Well, it’s all relative. That would be worse for someone who went through it, but for me, I would at least have the scars if he beat on me. I’d be able to point to it and say, “Okay, this is the evidence.” But what did I have with my father? A creepy smile. Or waking up and hearing him sharpening all the knives in the house. I was a child, but they were very real. They were profoundly sick.

I looked at the picture of him on your website. Creepy as hell.
Yeah, I don’t have many pictures of him, unfortunately. There are only a few of us together, and they’re all from when I’m older. There isn’t one in existence, that I know of, of me and my father when I’m younger.

In the book, at one point, young you fantasized about killing your father. Would you have been able to do that if the opportunity had presented itself?
I just don’t know. I thought an awful lot about it. It seemed at the time that I could, but when the opportunity didn’t come, I was relieved. It seems I hardly would have been justified. After all, where were my bruises? On the other hand, he was a pathogen for me, but I don’t know. I’m glad it was something that I didn’t have to face.

[Dog howls in the background]

Sorry. [To dog] Cow! Hey, Cow, it’s nothing. Cow, come here!

After everything, would you trade your experience for a normal childhood?
Some days I would, some days not. For a long time, I just wanted to get fixed. I wanted resolution or healing. At some point, though, I realized that just wasn’t going to happen. This stuff will always just be there. There are a lot of holes, and a lot of gaps, but that’s fine. That’s the way it is, and I don’t know any other way of living. This acceptance has made me a lot happier and a lot freer than I was when I was younger and still fighting against it. These experiences have made me very strong. I’ve got a very strong sense of self, which was built because I’ve always had to count on myself. I’m the kind of person that if I were in a plane going down and the pilots were dead, I’d totally be able to land it, without ever having set foot in a plane before. That’s just my nature. I’m very calm under extraordinary pressure.

I’d probably just curl up in a fetal position.[Laughs] It has made me feel much older than I am, but also made me kind of fearless. Like, how bad can it be?

Burroughs reads from his new memoir, A Wolf at the Table, on Apr 29, 2008 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble.

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