Sellevision (novel)

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Sellevision book cover (St. Martin's Press, September 2000)

Sellevision book cover (Picador, June 2003)

Sellevision (2000) is the first book published by Augusten Burroughs, author of the best-selling books Running with Scissors, Dry, and Magical Thinking. Unlike Burroughs' subsequent memoirs, Sellevision is a work of fiction.

"Sellevision" is a comedy that contains themes of greed and obsession. It is about four people, Max Andrews, Peggy Jean Smythe, Leigh, and Bebe, and their lives, all linked together with Sellevision, a television company.

Burroughs wrote the novel when he was getting sober. "I woke up one morning hung over, and I sat down and I wrote something," Burroughs said in an interview. "It was two pages and it made me laugh, and I hadn't laughed for years at that point, and that turned out to be the first couple pages of my first book, which was Sellevision. It's a novel about the home shopping world, that whole world--and, I didn't know what I had written. But it amused me, so I kept on writing, and I wrote until very late that night. And I drank a little bit less. And the same thing the next day. Again, I had no idea what I was doing or where it was coming from, but by the seventh day, I was not drinking at all."^[1]

The rights to Sellevision have been optioned by former Home Shopping Network CEO Mark Bozek and is currently in production as a feature film. Some actresses mentioned as signing on with the project include Carrie Fisher, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Kristin Davis [1], [2].