Author Burroughs will talk about his life — in detail — at Clark County Library

The devil's in the details is an old saying that means you're doomed if you ignore the minutiae of anything.

And the devil? He's in there to sound a cautionary note: A lack of details may cause problems, but the presence of them can, too.

Ask Augusten Burroughs.

The Massachusetts writer, most famous for his best-selling memoir "Running with Scissors," ran into a wall of disbelief after the book's release in 2002. Some readers and critics just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that Burroughs could recall his past in such fine detail. Some of the people who were represented in the book ended up suing him because, basically, their details didn't match his.

Burroughs will undoubtedly talk about the lawsuit, his ability to recall such detailed memories and the controversy it has caused when he visits Las Vegas on Saturday for "A One Night Stand with Augusten Burroughs" at the Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road. The free talk begins at 7 p.m.

"People think ... 'How can he remember such details? It must be filled with lies, lies, lies,' " Burroughs says during a recent interview. "When I step back and look at things, I can imagine how they feel."

But Burroughs trusts his memory, he says.

And if you ever doubted it, you may not once you hear him speak. Burroughs talks with the kind of thoroughness one might expect from a criminal witness or Rain Man. When he talks about something, such as how he used Twitter to follow the Tony awards, he provides all of the details necessary to tell the story and then some.

"I never had an explanation for my memory until my physician made me go see a psychiatrist," he says. "He asked me questions people had never asked me before. He asked, 'Do the tags in your T-shirts bother you?' I was sitting there with a T-shirt with a hole in it because the tags bother me."

The psychiatrist diagnosed him with a sensory processing disorder, Burroughs says, in the same family as Asperger syndrome and autism. Those disorders usually come with a superhuman memory.

He wishes he had that diagnosis back when people were asking him if he made up the stories in his best-seller and even in his other memoirs, Burroughs says.

Contact reporter Sonya Padgett at spadgett@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4564.