A WOLF AT THE TABLE
By Augusten Burroughs
St. Martin's, 242 pages, $27.95
Augusten's daddy didn't love him.
It gets worse. Augusten's daddy was really really mean to him. Now I'm also going to be mean to Augusten. Maybe this and other negative reviews will help him move on. We can only hope so. In his third memoir, he spends so much time wallowing in self-righteous indignation - Me! Can you believe it? Daddy didn't love me! - that this book almost reads like a parody of the genre this gadfly of American letters has been credited with developing.
Here's Burroughs recounting the time Daddy refused to help him fashion animal shapes out of balloons: "I wanted to make a balloon dog to go with the real dogs we had. I liked to pet their heads smooth. Their ears would go flat and their eyes would close and they were like seals. They would eat a macaroni noodle from your lips if you put it there. And they wouldn't touch your lips at all, not even a little. They were very artful and polite, people-dogs."
It gets worse. For instance, the cringe-worthy scene where his mother thinks he's calling out "dead" instead of "dad." Apparently, little Augusten has a pronunciation problem. Or he has deep-seated hatred toward his father, which we need to be endlessly reminded of with lines such as, "As soon as I was alone with him again, Dad was gone and dead was there in his place."
Then there's the climactic gun scene. This is the moment when boy Augusten rushes up to his older brother's room, grabs his brother's rifle, runs back down to where dead and his brother are screaming at each other, puts the gun in his brother's hands and says, "Kill him." This scene also could pass for a parody of intensity. "Sometimes, God wipes your mind and replaces the contents with a single image, unquestionable, and it is the only, the absolute answer. Gun."
The singular image God gives to Augusten that fateful evening is actually BB gun. Or so I discover dropping by Burroughs's blog, which features a post by his elder brother, John Elder Robison. In the post, the brother reports that a journalist misconstrued comments he made in an interview. Apparently remarks including "it wasn't as big a deal to me" and "it was, after all, only a BB gun" weren't meant to suggest that little brother Augusten, America's best-selling memoir writer, could have exaggerated or enhanced.
All the same, one has to admit that the drama of "Dad almost cut down by bullets" is quite a bit different from the horror of "Dad threatened with the stinging rebuke of a fusillade of BB-gun beads." A memoir does not have to be a precise recounting of exactly what happened. It's a memoir, comprising the variable stuff of memory. But what if you're a career memoir writer and you've used up all your best memories? The cupboard is almost bare and the wolf is at the table demanding more.
Hazy, dreamy recollections rendered with incongruous precision are the solution. Even the opening scene, later repeated, is more fiction than actuality: a chase through the woods that may or may not, but let's face it, probably never did happen.
Then there's several pages spent recreating Burroughs's parents' wedding day. Then there's the drawn-out, six-page scene in which one of the men digging the family's new septic tank mistakes Burroughs for a girl. Then there's the imagined scene where kid Augusten pushes daddy off a cliff.
It never happened. So what did actually happen? Augusten Burroughs's father, who died at the age of 70 in 2005, and was remarried for 25 years, was a philosophy professor, head of the department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He may have been a terrible father and first husband, but he was certainly more than the miserable caricature he's made out to be in this book.
Burroughs makes no attempt to understand his father, to find out who he was when he wasn't busy ignoring his son. Instead, he prefers to endlessly revel in his own recollections of abandoned misery. Yet Dad is the only even remotely interesting character in this book. Mom is shrill, weak and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Brother hightails it out of there. Boy Augusten endlessly ruminates on what will get daddy to love him. Meanwhile, Dr. John G. Robison smokes, stares at walls and thinks. About what? We have no idea.
A lot of energy has been expended trying to understand Augusten Burroughs and his dark vision. A Vanity Fair profile attacked him. A piece on National Public Radio tracked down his stroke-ridden elderly mother, savaged in Burroughs's first book, Running With Scissors, and desperately tried to get her to defend herself.
What's this obsession actually about? For Burroughs, perhaps it's about never getting over the shock of being abandoned; maybe it's about a vendetta against his parents that seems to be getting darker and more desperate even as it fritters into fantasy.
For the larger culture, it also seems to be about shock: the shock of our collective reality dissipating. We are lured to tell-all stories about abused 12-year-olds and alcoholic metrosexuals for a reason. Like Augusten Burroughs, we're trying these stories on for size. Like Augusten Burroughs, we can't seem to decide who we are or who we want to be.
Hal Niedzviecki's The Peep Diaries: How We Learned to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, will be published next spring. His blog is .