Burroughs Fascination

If I were a search engine and you typed into me “Burroughs” + “Fascination” you would find not just William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination but everything I have ever written about Burroughs, going back now to the early 1980s. Sometimes, the fascination is explicit, the subject itself of my writing, like a mirror reflecting back on itself, but always it is implicit, always there, always manifesting in the form of a riddle, that the secret of fascination is the fascination of the secret… What does that mean in practice? Looking back over my twenty books, my thousands of days and millions of words, it means I have tried to do justice to my secret by doing justice to the work of a great and fascinating writer. Because the secret is in me, looking for it in Burroughs has led me to discover and to share many of his secrets, all the while holding at a distance what it is I cannot bring myself to know about myself. The footsteps I have walked in by following Burroughs have in this sense described circles around an absent centre. Perhaps this is what actors experience, the peculiar sensation of being true not to yourself but to another. Perhaps this is what Burroughs meant when he said that every word was autobiographical and every word was fiction.