I like funny memoirs. Reading David Sedaris encouraged me to look at
my own family interactions from the exciting new vantage point of a
tragicomedy writer. “One day I’ll turn this steaming shit into comic
gold!” I told myself contentedly as yet another family dinner imploded.
I expected to read A Wolf at the Table with a familiar mixture
of horror and glee. Sadly, Augusten Burroughs’s new book won’t make you
laugh or cry, or really feel any emotion whatsoever. A Wolf at the
Table is a confused and disjointed attack against Burroughs’s
father that spirals into nowhere.
The book starts boring and gets worse. Baby Augusten really wants to
hug his dad, a psychotic philosophy teacher with bloody psoriasis all
over his body. “Patches of silvery, flaking skin, raw and meat-red
underneath, expanded on his body,” he writes. This kind of shock
writing is what made Burroughs famous in the first place, but here it’s
exhausting.
Burroughs’s father can’t stand his gay son. His mother tries to
protect him from his dad, but she also suffers from the unfortunate
Burroughs family compulsion to record every depressing moment of her
life on a typewriter in her room. Without a mom or a dad to talk to
about being a baby ‘mo, Burroughs fantasizes about killing his dad
fifty gazillion times, but never does. Because every single character
in the book is depressed, and repressing every single emotion, nothing
is ever really said and little actually happens.
Along the way to nowhere, Burroughs has epiphanies he thinks are
wholly original and totally fascinating. On his father: “His
ejaculations had created me… one erection, a number of thrusts, a
release. And there I stood.”
Don’t we already know the minutia of Burroughs’s terrible childhood?
We do! Running with Scissors was a masterpiece compared to
this drivel. You know when you read your diary sometimes and nothing
interesting has happened and you think to yourself, “Well… fuck. This
would make a bad book”? This is a thought that’s never passed through
Burroughs’s head. He needs to go outside and plant some petunias and
keep his stories about his fucked-up father between him and his
therapist. Don’t buy the book.