Augusten Burroughs

If there’s one thing Augusten Burroughs appears to thrive at, it’s survival.

In his dynamic reminiscence Running with Scissors, the American magazine writer detailed a spectacularly screwed-up childhood, rife with insanity, anarchy and a pedophilic relationship (condoned by his manic-depressive mother) with a man 20 years his senior. It was harrowing, grotesque and obscene. It was also hilarious, absolutely devoid of self-pity, and often blisteringly brilliant; a memoir for people who show more thought Angela’s Ashes needed more laughs, and more heavily medicated characters.

Finally escaping the madness, Burroughs appears to adjust rather well to “normal” life. As Dry begins, he has cast off the trappings of his former life, and has now reinvented himself as a single, gay, “vain and shallow” New York ad executive pulling down six figures a year.

As a sidenote, he is now a two-fisted drunk, “foul, dark and ugly” polishing off a litre of Dewars a night, plus cocktails, plus 15 Benadryl pills a day to combat his allergy to alcohol. However, he denies that a problem exists, viewing himself rather as an eccentric, “somebody who mixes stripes with plaids, somebody who laughs too loudly in restaurants.”

Forced to enter a rehabilitation program, Burroughs enrolls in the Proud Institute, a detoxification centre which caters exclusively to homosexual clientele. Idly imagining a pristine compound complete with good music, crisp linens, and carafes of water with lemon wedges, he finds instead (in Duluth, Minn.) a harsh dose of gritty realism located within a factory neighbourhood.

As the factuality of his situation sinks in, he tries desperately to elevate himself over his fellow self-destructive addicts. “I don’t belong here. I make over $200,000 a year. The CEO of Coca-Cola once complimented my tie.”

Unlike the blazing dementia of Scissors, Dry traverses more familiar terrain, the stuff of maudlin television dramas and celebrity biographies. Yet Burroughs, dry in both body and wit, crafts a tale that resonates more fully because of its familiarity. There is a certain amount of agonizingly honest navel-gazing (as befits the scenario), but like Scissors, he never allows himself to lapse into sentimentality. Burroughs is smart enough to realize that he is both hero and villain of his piece, never painting himself as becoming ennobled through his battles. Enraptured with liquor, he forsakes everything for the bottle, ignoring the distress of co-workers and confidants, and most unforgivably, leaving his belt friend Pighead to suffer the devastation of AIDS alone.

A viciously sardonic attitude pervades much of Dry, akin to the blistering satire of support groups found in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Burroughs thoroughly comprehends and appreciates the fount of black comedy and dark parody that pervades the recovery process, a routine abounding with AA meetings, group therapy and bottomless mugs of coffee.

Burroughs is also not afraid to delve into the darkest corners of addiction. At moments, the lure of relapse exerting itself, Dry resembles the bleakest passages of John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, nakedly exposing the fallacy that alcoholism can somehow be utterly defeated.

Dry is not meant as a guidebook for a successful transition into sobriety. It is the story of Burroughs, a funny, sad individual who manages to find humour in despair, dark though it may be. His story, alternately bizarre and uproarious, is a story everyone will understand. show less

What to make of this one? It's one of the best-selling and best-known works in the "midlife memoirs" category, but it's far from the best of them. It might, however, be one of the weirdest non-stories ever committed to paper. And it's a tremendous little guilty pleasure. While you sometimes get the sense that authors in this genre "work through" their material in a sort of semi-therapeutic kind of way, I don't get the sense that any of that is going on here. Burroughs doesn't seem to be show more "crafting" these stories as much as reeling them off, and why not? His childhood and adolescence seem to have given him material that most memoir writers can only dream of. He's just putting it out there, really. It'd probably be too weird to work as fiction, and I simply can't believe somebody tried to film this thing. What can you say about a book whose high point is, very arguably, a sixteen-year-old girl's memorably vivid description of her yeast infection? Where do you even go with that?

And that, really, is the problem with "Running with Scissors". If I were a creative writing type, I'd say that it lacked narrative cohesion, but what it lacks, really, is any sort of cohesion at all. There's not much to knit these I-can't-believe-it moments of record-breaking dysfunction together, but that's less a knock on the author than an intrinsic problem with the material he's dealing with here. It'd be an even-money bet that nobody he spent a significant amount of time around before turning eighteen could've acted normal for forty-eight consecutive hours, if they had made an honest-to-God effort. He and his adopted siblings didn't grow up free-spirited as much as feral. In this book, one inexplicable near-disaster follows another, and each character that gets introduced is more estranged from reality than the last. You could read this one as an indictment of the permissive post-sixties, but nobody here even considered themselves much of a hippie or a bohemian, and one of them went to Yale Medical School. It's easier, honestly, to think of them them a horde of hopeless oddballs. "Running With Scissors" might be called episodic narrative, or a picaresque, but maybe that's just the shape texts take when things keep on happening at a furious pace and nothing ever even starts to make sense. At the end of the novel, the Burroughs tries on an authorial tone to suggest that what he really learned in the filthy, muddled space that his mother's psychiatrist called a home was survival, and, yes, it's a minor miracle that everyone here didn't end up in either Walpole or Danvers. But I also suspect that the author is trying to make sense of things that simply cannot be made sense of. To give him some credit, he seems to sense that he's got some high-octane weirdness here that can more or less speak for itself, and he's smart enough not to take himself too seriously. I'm not sure that he'd hesitate to call the version of himself we see here an immaculately shallow queer cliché. In the book, he comes off as resilient and likable enough, which is perhaps more than you can say for some of the aggressively unsocialized Finch children. The rest is noise. Oh, and bodily fluids and ill-considered construction projects. My own upbringing was, in a couple of ways, different than the ones you see on American sitcoms, but after finishing "Running With Scissors," I got to thinking that I'd never really appreciated how normal a lot of it actually was. I guess this makes this book life-changing, if perhaps not in a way that the author intended. show less

4.8

A coworker loaned this to me because she wanted to know if it was just her. It wasn't. Despite the reviews, I did not find this book hysterical. I laughed at a few places, but it was mostly uncomfortable laughter. To me, this book was horrifying. It's a memoir of a dysfunctional family--shocking--but this one is special. Augusten's mom is crazy, his dad won't even return phone calls after the divorce, and so Augusten is sent to live with his mom's shrink. Their house is scary. On Augusten's show more first day there, the grandson of the shrink takes a dump in the living room, right under the piano. And nobody cleans it up. I'm still wondering how long it took before someone did something about it. No rules in a house apparently means, to this family, that literally anything is okay. The wife eats dog food. On purpose. There's a woman afraid of dirt that lives locked in a second-floor room. And Augusten is basically molested by another patient who sometimes shows up. And I'm left wondering how the hell this man became a shrink. It's well written, and rather like a train wreck--I couldn't stop reading. But I'm not planning on picking up any more of his books. show less