24 hours after the sad departure of Molly and Raina, I’m almost recovered from our weekend of gun-slinging-decorating-debauchery.  Even though I may be the “hostess with the mostess” (Molly’s term) I’m not so good at remembering to put my camera in my purse so you’ll have to cruise over to Raina’s blog for the recap.  I believe Erin will be uploading some pictures here tomorrow as well.  Sooooo… I’ll be writing about something else

Tonight (it’s Monday night right now) Mattypants and I cruised over to Book People to see Augusten Burroughs read from his latest memoir, You Better Not Cry.  Burroughs was rail-thin with a great sense of style and graciously fielded less-than-interesting questions from the audience:  ”did you know my name is Meg, just like the girl in your story about Wendy’s fast food restaurant?”  Oh Augusten, you are a better person than me.

You’re also a good decorator.

As luck would have it (I was really hoping to write about his house after the reading), the New York Times just did a piece on Mr. Burroughs home, which is in an apartment building as ill-fated as the character’s lives in most of his stories.

Mr. Burroughs bought the $625,000 Battery Park studio, his first home purchase, a year ago from “sleek creatures in Prada” who quickly went bankrupt and fled the country.

The unfinished building’s exposed wires and touch-and-go hot water system didn’t stop Mr. Burroughs from piecing together a lovely apartment on his own.

The entire space revolves around the king sized bed that functions as his office placed smack-dab in the center of the room.

Augusten did all of his home shopping on first dibs (mental note:  write some memoirs to afford a similar shopping spree).  

Downloading images of furniture, like this Borge Mogensen sofa, Mr. Burroughs used a program similar to photoshop to arrange each piece proportionately before making his purchases.  The sofa now rests at the foot of his office-bed.

Despite the fact that he can’t “sell you this place for $15 now,” and the building’s future is unknown, Mr. Burroughs is happy with his purchase.  Keeping in perfect pace with his well documented life, the foreclosure scandal seems to be nothing more than a tragic blip that will one day be given comedic life in print and should send enough of us to the book store shelves for him to just buy the whole damn building.

Case in point:  I found this photo of his former home via the magic of google.  The home was destroyed in a flood (ironically, Augusten installed lightning protection because “I’m the sort of person who gets struck by lightning”).  The story is now recalled in the book I just waited in line to have signed this evening.

Related posts:

1. Lightning Only Strikes the Same Place a Thousand Times