Sellevision in Queereaders

Jul 25, 2009 Chloe rated it really liked it

Shelves: joyous_nihilism, fiction

I am not a fan of Augusten Burroughs. I think I can specifically remember the moment when I decided this. I was standing behind the counter at the Borders I was working for at the time reading Dry, Burroughs' retelling of his time as an Ad Exec and alcoholic, when I read a paragraph that struck me as especially odious and, quite literally, hurled the book onto the floor and stomped away. I don't know who it was that decided that people who have had moderately-fucked up lives were deserving of ha I am not a fan of Augusten Burroughs. I think I can specifically remember the moment when I decided this. I was standing behind the counter at the Borders I was working for at the time reading Dry, Burroughs' retelling of his time as an Ad Exec and alcoholic, when I read a paragraph that struck me as especially odious and, quite literally, hurled the book onto the floor and stomped away. I don't know who it was that decided that people who have had moderately-fucked up lives were deserving of having their tell-alls published, I'm going to blame reality TV with this one(because they haven't been my scapegoat for a few weeks), but it's a distinctly repugnant trend in writing right now.

Most people's lives (and I'm including Dave Eggers, Sean Wilsey, and all those others who know who they are in this rant) are just not that interesting by the time they're in their late twenties to warrant an autobiography. Truthfully, unless your mother was a truck stop whore who dressed you as a girl to turn tricks and got you hooked on smack when you were ten (and, sadly, JT LeRoy was a ruse), your life is not going to be that interesting. Instead you're going to sound like some sort of sniveling twit and I'm not going to be interested in your further works.

Sellevision is Augusten Burroughs' first book, a novel of the standard fictional variety. Set in a fictional home shopping network, Sellevision follows a few months in the lives of the network's lead hosts. Max has just inadvertantly exposed himself during a children's toys segment and is left looking for a new career. Peggy Jean is a tightly wound mother with a stalker fixated on her hairy ear lobes, a husband with eyes only for the nubile teen next door and a burgeoning valium/alcohol abuse problem. Bebe is a compulsive shopper (and the network's highest-rated star) who is dating a man who seems far too good to be true and Leigh is dating a man is who is definitely not good- Howard Toast, the head of programming for Sellevision.

In a fashion that reminds one of no one so much as Douglas Coupland, Burroughs builds the hilarity by slow degrees until the last thirty pages when everything comes together in a gut buster of a belly laugh. In fact, I don't think I've ever laughed harder at the last sentence of a book before; it was like the cherry on top of the proverbial sundae. Still amusing a decade after publication, Sellevision seems like a moment frozen in time. A moment where Augusten Burroughs stood atop a precipice and had to decide whether to keep up the arduous work of actually creating fictional characters or whether he should pillage his semi-interesting adolescence for uncomfortable anecdotes about psychologists finding signs in his morning bowel movements. Oh, what might have been! ...more

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Sep 19, 2007 Carla rated it liked it

extremely funny depiction of what working in the advertising world is really like. i love burroughs sarcasm and willingness to admit his addictive personality traits. made me realize how human he is and how we are all connected in our use of defense mechanisms, they may be different but they are manifested for similar reasons, escape....

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