I Am a Character in Literature
This is not an online quiz (“I’m a Mr. Darcy!”) or a rumination on life imitating art. My husband is the memoirist Augusten Burroughs, and I appear in some of his books. I am literally literary. If his publisher is running a promotion, several of my most intimate details can be had for as little as $1.99.
Augusten and I met when I became his agent in 1999. We had a writer-manager relationship for a decade, upgraded it to a romance, got married in 2013 and I’m still his agent. I’ve read the earliest drafts of all his work, published and unpublished. His first two memoirs were about his life before I knew him. Those were followed by contemporary essays in which I began getting cameos as a character named alternately “my agent” and “my friend Christopher.”
He’s a great writer who captures people’s essences with fine details and sharp dialogue. Even my briefest scenes were startling. It wasn’t just the words; he conjured me, my speech patterns and mannerisms and personality, more identifiably than if it were video footage. His perspective brought me into sharper focus than I ever could. As we moved from being business partners to life partners, I (arguably necessarily) became a larger thread in his work.
I married a memoirist. What did I think was going to happen?
