His consuming passions

"It made me laugh, so I just kept writing," says Burroughs. "Seven days later I was no longer drinking because there was no time, and I'd finished the book." Burroughs had already been through rehab, but when AIDS claimed the life of his best friend, Pighead, he relapsed. "I was made out of grief, fury, rage and disgust, very confused and angry. I didn't have friends, hadn't managed my life well, had basically blown it. Without question [this book] saved my life. I knew it was not White Teeth, nothing that would be read in 200 years, but if you give yourself over to it, it will make you laugh and escape into this ridiculous world. It was the only thing vapid enough and mean enough and petty enough to distract me from what was imminent death."

Fans - and we are legion, making Burroughs a fixture on bestseller lists - relish his dark sense of humour, his ability to provoke laughter while describing the appalling. This manifests itself best on paper: today Burroughs is polite, soft-spoken, affable and utterly unflustered about being interrogated in a crowded restaurant. He's great company - I want to take him home with me - but the laugh-per-minute quotient is lower than you might expect from reading his work.

In Running with Scissors he revealed that his mother gave him away to her psychiatrist, a man who advocated masturbation and faeces-reading (for portents), treated family members with Valium and electroshock, and ignored the boy's sexual abuse at the hands of his lodger. He made it sound hilarious. Then Dry chronicled his time as an alcoholic advertising executive. It contained passages raw enough to inspire retching even as you wiped away tears of mirth.

This is his survival tactic. "Ever since I was a kid humour is how I dealt with the absurdities and extreme circumstances." Certainly it's less toxic than alcohol, which he downed by the gallon, despite being so allergic he had to pop antihistamines to pursue his addiction. But obsessive personalities know all about extremes. During his relapse Burroughs watched the QVC and Home Shopping Network channels for 12 to 15 hours a day.

"And not with a sense of irony. I watched because it was live, and I didn't see any other person during the week. It's very repetitive and soothing, like watching a fire. It doesn't change. During an airline crash or hostage situation, it's not happening; they're still selling the 18-carat gold Greek key necklace. It's still $299 or $39.99 a month on Easy Pay."

The protagonists of Sellevision work on a low-rent shopping channel, hawking everything from diamonelle jewels to cleaning products. Their lives are all but indistinguishable from their transmissions, up to and including the woman who never met a product she didn't want to buy in multiples of three, a compulsion that makes her one of the station's highest earners. Who better to persuade others to rationalise parting with their cash? Although it's a lightweight romp, Burroughs raises valid questions about our consumer culture. Why do we love things so much? What is it about stuff that consumes us?

"On some level these products offer comfort and stimulation. It's something to do. Shopping can be like a drug. It can make you very manic; you move from one thing to the next and are never completely satisfied. Often the people who called in to these shows were lonely like me, using shopping as a therapy. The products they bought represented some sort of hope. They wanted to feel beautiful again." As if this purchase would "solve" their lives? "Yes, and we know better than that, but we also don't, because we hope."

BURROUGHS IS AN INTRIGUING MIX of light and dark. How can this sweetie pie be the same man who, in a collection of essays entitled Magical Thinking, admitted to stepping on a toddler's hand then running away, so that her mother thought the wee girl was having a tantrum; the same man who first blinded, then drowned, a mouse with the temerity to invade his bathtub?

I can almost picture that Burroughs working in advertising, yet he surprises me by refuting the notion that it's a supremely cynical business. But what do I know? Everything I know about advertising I learned from Bewitched.

"That was my whole frame of reference, too," he agrees quickly. "But for the most part the people believe in the products. What you do is hook on to the one great thing about something. It's a business for optimists. Most people don't feel they're pulling one over on you."

My eyebrows must have shot heavenward. "It's really less cynical than you would think, though I became very cynical because I was in it too long and I hated it. People are very earnest and want to do good work, work consumers can respect. And, you know, Salman Rushdie used to write commercials. Albert Watson, David Fincher, photographer Sarah Moon, they all did commercials. So actually, people are exposed to the thinking of these great minds without knowing it." (Did I mention that Burroughs is a supreme optimist?)

LAST OCTOBER HE TURNED 40, TO his amazement and delight. As an unhappy kid longing for his horrific childhood to end, he yearned to be older, all the while dreading when "your pieces start falling off like hubcaps".

While he's quick to agree that life begins at 40, it's only because he agrees with everything first, even if he goes on to disagree, really. Burroughs's shot at happiness really launched itself around the time he met his partner, Dennis, and wrote Sellevision, marking a major turning point in his journey. Astonishingly, for one who suffered so at the hands of others, he says, "I was a stupid person when I was young and made a lot of really bad decisions. After Pighead died, it's almost like my molecules rearranged themselves. I was very unfamiliar to myself. At first I thought nothing mattered to me anymore. I've come to see that much of what used to matter doesn't, but what has taken its place is far larger. Things started to click for me in 1990, when I wrote Sellevision. I walked through one door and became exactly who I am."

He knew he'd succeed as a writer, if only because he refused to give up. "Maybe it wasn't a great book but that didn't matter, because it was 150 pages and they were numbered and had chapter titles. I knew I could do it again and again and again."

Burroughs has definitely found his spiritual home in the world of letters - he's rabidly devoted to the written word. He'd rather be reading than anything, and has to force himself to fall in with Dennis's plans actually to leave the house and engage with the world. "Left to my own devices I'd never leave my office. I love writing fiction, creating a world which becomes more real than the real world, so I have trouble being motivated to do anything else. But when I do, I'm good at it." He writes every day, though. "I feel adrift when I'm not writing. I'm not analytical about writing. I've always been afraid to study literature in case it ruins it for me."

Perish the thought, given the number of books this man buys in shops, online and via catalogues. "The UPS man visits us twice a day, at eleven and four," he says with a grin. He is mad about AL Kennedy's Paradise ("I love her!") and Lionel Shriver's Orange prizewinner, We Need to Talk About Kevin, urging me to read it on my next plane journey. Before that it was Paula Fox's novel, Desperate Characters.

He's not a great fan of memoirs, funnily enough, preferring fiction, science and history. The rest of his money goes on antiques. "If there were a home shopping network for antiques I would never stop watching it. Never!"

In addition to another collection of essays, due out over the summer, this September sees the release of the film version of Running with Scissors. The screenplay was written by director Ryan Murphy, but he and Burroughs spoke daily to flesh out the action beyond what appeared in the text.

Describing it as "like watching home movies except with prettier people", Burroughs is delighted by the final product, and especially Annette Bening, who, he gushes, gives the performance of her career. "She looks so much like my mother, walks and talks like her, she just channelled her. We had conversations before filming - she wanted to know very specific things, asking about my mother's relationship with my father, and her childhood and family. She's a little intimidating because she's so damn smart."

Though he might blush to hear it, he's a bit awe-inspiring himself. Richard Nixon, of all people, once said that the finest steel has to go through the hottest fire. Burroughs did, and he's emerged strong as a girder with a talent that promises to endure.

Sellevision by Augusten Burroughs, is published by Atlantic Books, priced 7.99.