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.