A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (edition 2008)

I first ‘met’ Augusten Burroughs when I read his memoir ‘Running with Scissors.’ I was blown away by the heart wrenching yet hilarious account of his life at the house of his mother’s shrink. To say his life was bizarre would be an understatement. Then I read ‘Dry’ which was Augusten’s follow-up memoir which recounts his years as an alcoholic and his sobering up. More recently I read ‘You’d Better not Cry’ where Augusten shares a sequence of Christmas experiences from childhood to present. These books were all ‘A’ reads.

A WOLF AT THE TABLE is not the same as the previous books, it is darker and more mentally disturbing than Augusten’s previous memoirs. This book is about the wolf at the table - his father. His mother was a manic-depressive poet and prone to suicide, while his father was a rage-filled alcoholic psychopath who worked as a university philosophy lecturer in Massachusetts. As a boy Augusten craved the love and attention of his father, his father constantly rejected him and was showed no affection at all. When he would meet his father at the door his father would ignore the affectionate greeting and just pour himself a drink. Augusten’s parents had a nightmare marriage full of drinking, violence and screaming matches. His mother often left the house taking Augusten with her - on one such occasion the father deliberately let Augusten’s Guinea Pig die - a chapter that had me in tears. A few pages later one of the dogs die when Augusten’s father refused to take the ailing animal to the vet for treatment. More tears! Unlike his other memoirs A WOLF AT THE TABLE has little humour in it to counteract the horror of what you are reading. This is a book, out of all his books, I think would have been the hardest for Augusten to write. The rejection by his father and how he comes to terms with it was the book he needed to write, a cathartic experience for him.

The reason A WOLF AT THE TABLE was only marked as average was because I found it hard to believe his earlier memories - the one as a baby - it seemed far fetched he could remember back that far so clearly. Maybe he could, his childhood was certainly harrowing enough to scar his memories for ever, but I can’t be sure they were his memories or the memories he got by listening to what family members told him. Augusten certainly believes they are how he remembers. Another problem I had was that one of the things he mused on as bothering him as a child was the way his parents pronounced his name “Augusten“. In fact Augusten was born Christopher so surely that is what his parents would have called him as a child. It was Augusten who changed his name from Christopher. I am not saying the memoirs of his early childhood are not true - I believe to him they are; but he may have been told about the events so often that they have become his memories. Augusten’s older brother has confirmed the mental instability of their father and their wretched lives as a result in his own memoir about his life with Asperger’s.

Why was his father a wolf at the table? I think the title is very apt for what was revealed inside the cover of the book - a wolf in sheep's clothing is someone who seems to be a good person but is really a bad person - that is what the father was. He was an emotionally cold, controlling and abusive man who managed to fool the world into believing he is a wonderful husband and father, but in reality he was treating his family dreadfully.

Considerably less playful than Burroughs's earlier memoirs, A Wolf at the Table paints a portrait of his father as an inexplicable, dangerous alcoholic. That's a pretty complete summary of the book--the rest is detail. As I was reading Burroughs's description of his family's home in Amherst, I pictured the home of some people I knew there in about the same year. It turns out that they lived pretty near each other, which confirms that Burroughs can evoke a landscape as effectively as an emotion. ( )

Definitely more dark than his other works. I am left with questioning why his mother is protrayed as quite loving in this book while in Running with Scissors she is unloving and crazier . . .? ( )

This is a prequel to the best-selling Running with Scissors, which I have not read. Told mostly from the point of view of Burroughs as a young boy, it is often quite sad and disturbing, but an oddly easy read, with a soupçon of redemption at the end. Burroughs presents his father as emotionally neglectful, violent and alcoholic, and his mother as not up to the task of protecting herself or her children.

Because of all the media coverage of Burroughs' veracity issues, I was constantly second-guessing the truthfulness of the narrative as I read. Yet, unlike Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle, my BS meter did not often go off. Burroughs' mother and brother have their own memoirs, and I'm not inclined to adjudicate their respective cases, but this book felt true to me.

Warning: two depictions of animal abuse. This kind of stuff is usually a deal-breaker for me, but I had to stick with the book because it's for my library book club. ( )

Some people will never really understand why other people need to write books like this one. Why some of us drink in these awful details with an overwhelming sense of relief that says, you are not alone. They are the lucky ones. It is probably easy to go bombasting around town with a "No Fear" bumper sticker if you don't know how it feels when Big Trouble suddenly focuses on you, when you suddenly wake up and find Menace leaning over your bed. I think writing a book like this would be cathartic for even the lamest of writers, which is not the case with Augusten Burroughs.

Spare, chilling, devastating, heartbreaking.. How much a distant parent can hurt their child just by refusing to look at them, oy. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can burn in memory forever and a day.

From the book: "Maybe, I thought, I don't need a father to be happy. Maybe what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what's missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be.”

Right. Bad children need to build a better life on a foundation teetering on the edge of a hole of emptiness, put there by the unkindness, selfishness and neglect of those who were bigger and should have known better. How fortunate for the reading public that the literary house Mr. Burroughs has wrought upon the lacking foundation given to him by his parents offers us so many delightful books, full of food for thought and, thankfully, leavened with humor.

I felt so bad after reading this I immediately followed it with Dave Barry's "The Shepherd, The Angel, And Walter The Christmas Miracle Dog." I cried happy tears when the father in this book said, with great feeling, "Good Dog." A sweet story and a good chaser after all the horror of "A Wolf at the Table."