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Summary
Summary
"As a little boy, I had a dream that my father had taken me to the woods where there was a dead body. He buried it and told me I must never tell. It was the only thing we'd ever done together as father and son, and I promised not to tell. But unlike most dreams, the memory of this one never left me. And sometimes...I wasn't altogether sure about one thing: was it just a dream?"""
When Augusten Burroughs was small, his father was a shadowy presence in his life: a form on the stairs, a cough from the basement, a silent figure smoking a cigarette in the dark. As Augusten grew older, something sinister within his father began to unfurl. Something dark and secretive that could not be named.
Betrayal after shocking betrayal ensued, and Augusten's childhood was over. The kind of father he wanted didn't exist for him. This father was distant, aloof, uninterested...
And then the "games" began.
With "A Wolf at the Table, " Augusten Burroughs makes a quantum leap into untapped emotional terrain: the radical pendulum swing between love and hate, the unspeakably terrifying relationship between father and son. Told with scorching honesty and penetrating insight, it is a story for anyone who has ever longed for unconditional love from a parent. Though harrowing and brutal, "A Wolf at the Table" will ultimately leave you buoyed with the profound joy of simply being alive. It's a memoir of stunning psychological cruelty and the redemptive power of hope.
Author Notes
Augusten X. Burroughs was born with the name of Christopher Richter Robison in Pittsburgh, PA in 1965. At the age of 18, he chose the name Augusten X. Burroughs and legalized it in a Boston courtroom. He was raised in Western Massachusetts, after his mother had abandoned him to live with her psychiatrist. Burroughs dropped out of school at 13, his mother and her shrink helping him fake a suicide attempt, got his GED at 17 and then flunked out of community college. Burroughs survived a harrowing childhood, but used it and the strength he gained from surviving to springboard his literary career.
He has been a dog trainer, candy store clerk, waiter, sail cutter, store detective and, from the age of 19, an advertising copywriter. Burroughs lived in San Francisco for five years, then moved to New York in the early 1990s.
Burroughs writes memoirs (including the bestseller Running with Scissors which was made into a movie in 2006), as well as a sex column in DETAILS magazine, the occasional commentary for NPR, articles for New York Magazine, and essays for salon.com, Borders and Booksense. All of Augusten's subsequent books -Dry, Magical Thinking, Possible Side Effects, A Wolf at the Table, You Better Not Cry, This is How and Lust and Wonder- were instant New York Times bestsellers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A searing, emotional portrait of a son who wants nothing more than the love his father will not grant him, Burroughs's latest memoir (after 2004's Dry) is indeed powerful. Absent is the wry humor of Running with Scissors and the absurd poignancy of Burroughs's years living with his mother's Svengali-like psychiatrist. Instead, Burroughs focuses on the years he lived both in awe and fear of his philosophy professor father in Amherst, Mass. Despite frequent trips with his mother to escape his father's alcoholic rages, Burroughs was determined to win his father's affection, secretly touching the man's wallet and cigarettes and even going so far as to make a surrogate dad with pillows and discarded clothing. Only after his father's neglect--or cruelty--leads to the death of Burroughs's beloved guinea pig during one of the family's many separations does the son turn against the father. Avoiding self-pity, Burroughs paints his father with unwavering honesty, forcing the reader to confront, as he did, a man who even on his deathbed, refused his son a hint of affection. His father missed so much, Burroughs muses, not knowing his son. Luckily, Burroughs does not deny the reader such an enormous pleasure. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Burroughs' childhood was the stuff of nightmares long before he was adopted by his troubled mother's therapist (a harrowing experience rendered to brutal and often hilarious effect in his 2002 best-seller, Running with Scissors). His earliest years were spent in fear of his biological father, John, an alcoholic with a chilling smile and a black heart. All young Augusten ever wanted was his dad's attention and approval. He rarely received either. In fact, the late John G. Robison, head of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts, seemed to derive pleasure from making his son suffer. When Augusten and his mother fled the house following one of John's liquor-fueled rampages, the mean, moody man promised to care for his son's beloved pet gerbil. Instead, he left the animal to die. Augusten dreaded the idea that he was just like his father, a fear that grew deeper with each passing year. Following the publication of Running with Scissors, Burroughs was sued by his adoptive family, who claimed his book was fraught with hyperbole and lies. One almost hopes that this sad, sporadically funny offering took some liberties with the truth. Expect lots of interest in Burroughs' first memoir in five years.--Block, Allison Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN college, I had a friend named Kurt. A lot of people know someone like Kurt in college - brilliant, obsessive and kind of scary. He stayed up 72 hours reading Goethe. He filled a 50-page notebook with tiny scrawled notes about Henry James. (These weren't class assignments.) He loved absolute principles and what he called "the timeless." He railed against hypocrisy. He liked to stand outside fraternities and shout lines from Byron. When a poem offended him, he ate it - crumple, chew, swallow - and ended up with an intestinal blockage. My friends and I loved Kurt, and we worried about him. "The Other" is a novel about a Kurt who goes off the rails and ends up living as a hermit in a remote forest in Washington State. The author is David Guterson, of "Snow Falling on Cedars" fame. The recluse is John William Barry, sole heir to a banking and timber fortune. John William, as his friends call him, is as old-school Seattle as it gets. His great-great-grandfather was a member of the Denny Party, whose members founded the city in 1851. In the Northwest, this is akin to May-flower lineage. John William is a smart, troubled rich kid who loathes phonies and sellouts, beginning with his own "weaseling, demonic forefathers." He's the kind of guy who drops acid and chants, "No escape from the unhappiness machine." John William tries to escape the machine by taking the hermit's path, holing up in the woods for seven long, cold, lonely years. In "The Other," the hermit's story is told in retrospect by his best friend, Neil Countryman, an English teacher who emerges as the book's most interesting character. They'd make a good buddy movie, Countryman and the hermit. They meet at a high school track meet in 1972. John William runs for Lakeside, Seattle's elite prep school (and Bill Gates's alma mater). Countryman, the son of a carpenter, runs for Roosevelt, a working-class public school. Like many wealthy, virile boys in Seattle, John William tests himself by climbing in the Cascades, where he and Countryman forge a friendship through wilderness-survival adventures. They also smoke a lot of dope around a lot of campfires as John William blathers on about Gnosticism and teases Countryman about his dream of becoming a writer. "'Lackey,' he would say, about half sardonically. 'Fame and money for prostituting your soul. Minister of Information for the master class.'" Trustafarians like John William usually grow out of their Prince Hal phase by their mid-20s, in plenty of time to make partner in Dad's firm by 35. Not John William. He drops out of college, buys a mobile home, parks it by a remote river on the Olympic Peninsula and spends his days reading Gnostic theology. When even that seems too decadent, he carves a cave out of limestone and retreats into the gloom. While John William builds a cave, Neil Countryman builds a life. He gets married, buys a house, has kids. But he never abandons John William. Countryman treks through dense forest to bring his friend food and medicine. He and the hermit conspire to fake John William's disappearance in Mexico, to give him some relief from his worried parents. After a while, Countryman realizes his old friend isn't going to grow out of this Han-Shan-in-the-cave period. "So what, exactly, is the deal with you?" Countryman asks during an exasperated moment. John William's answer: "I don't want to participate." But Countryman keeps pressing. "Idiot," John William finally replies. "You've got your whole life in front of you, maybe 50 or 60 years. And what are you going to do with that? Be a hypocrite, entertain yourself, make money and then die?" Well, yes. "The Other" is a moving portrait of male friendship, the kind that forms on the cusp of adulthood and refuses to die, no matter how maddening the other guy turns out to be. It's also a finely observed rumination on the necessary imperfection of life - on how hypocrisy, compromise and acceptance creep into our lives and turn strident idealists into kind, loving, fully human adults. Wisdom isn't the embrace of everything we rejected at 19. It's the understanding that absolutes are for dictators and fools. "I'm a hypocrite, of course," Countryman says, reflecting on his own life and John William's doomed pursuit of purity. "I live with that, but I live." David Guterson broke out of the box nearly 15 years ago with his wildly successful debut novel. Neither of his subsequent novels, "East of the Mountains" and "Our Lady of the Forest," has matched that first book's sales, but here's the admirable thing: His books keep getting better. There's a deus ex machina at the end of this new one that, a little disappointingly, plants guilt for John William's struggles at the feet of a certain suspect. But the voice of Neil Countryman is that of a good, thoughtful man coming into middle-class, middle-aged fullness, and his recollections of life in Seattle have a wonderful richness and texture. This Seattle isn't just a trendy backdrop peopled with Starbucks-sippers at the Pike Place Market. Guterson's characters live in the city as it really is. They grab fish and chips at Spud on Green Lake, browse for used books at Shorey's, trip on the mushrooms that grow wild in Ravenna Park. Guterson knows Seattle the way Updike knows small-town Pennsylvania, and there are moments in "The Other" that have a "Rabbit at Rest" quality, as tossed-off observations and bits of dialogue capture the essence of a place and a time. In the early years of his friendship with John William, Countryman wanders through the Barry home, a Laurelhurst Tudor, noticing the white-bellied nudes on the bathroom wallpaper - I've been in that house, or at least its neighbor. Decades later, he listens to his son suggesting they eat at a new brewpub that specializes in mussels and frites - I've been there, too. The beauty is that Guterson doesn't stop to explain. He just drops in these pitch-perfect notes and keeps the music going. Bruce Barcott is the author of "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw." He fives in Seattle.
Library Journal Review
New York Times best-selling author Burroughs's (Running with Scissors) latest memoir takes a searing look at his relationship with his father. Artists including Patti Smith contributed four original songs to this recording, inspired by the text: there are sound effects at dramatic points as well as a subtle score, one that neither intrudes on nor overwhelms Burroughs's relatively talented narration. In audiobook form, Burroughs's memoir is an unforgettable experience that will resonate with many. Highly recommended for all collections. [Also available from Macmillan Audio as a retail ed. unabridged CD (ISBN 978-1-4272-0425-7. $29.95); audio clip available through www.bbcaudiobooksamerica.com.--Ed.]--Gloria Maxwell, Metropolitan Community Coll.-Penn Valley, Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.