Augusten Burroughs’ Hipster Cred Rises 10 More Points

By Neal 

tegan-augusten-headshots.jpgWhen fans of the Spin Book Club meets at Housing Works next Thursday night (Sept. 4) to talk with Augusten Burroughs about his new memoir, A Wolf at the Table, there’ll be an added bonus: Tegan Quin (of Tegan & Sara fame) will be performing a new song she wrote, inspired by Burroughs and at his request, for the first time ever in public. “I was a huge fan of Augusten’s and was ecstatic when the request came in from my management,” Quin emailed about the song. “It was very hard for me to write the song mainly because it was the first time I had ever tried to write a song for anyone before. I usually write about myself and was a little stuck at the start. This of course made it an even more exciting and fulfilling experience for me.”

Quin became a member of Spin‘s book club, where a cluster of musicians gather monthly to talk about books, after being interviewed for the magazine by club organizer Emily Zemler. She says she and her bandmate, twin sister Sara, have different tastes in literature but do have a few authors they both love and frequently swap books while on the road. Right now, she’s reading The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté: “I like to read fiction the best,” she admitted, “but try to change it up and read nonfiction to challenge myself every few books.”

(photos: Getty Images)