Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Books and Blogs
Miscellaneous
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
Aug
16
Book Review: Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs
2008 at 9am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Augusten Burroughs is growing on me, but I don’t think we’re all the way there yet. Being the compulsive reader that I am, I’ve read his memoirs in order, beginning with Running With Scissors a few years ago. At the time, I was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology (I completed my Master’s and then concluded that I did not, in fact, want to be a therapist, for a variety of reasons), and I was fascinated and appalled by the life he led as a young boy and the misadventures and traumatic experiences he had while living with his mother’s crazy psychiatrist….but when the shock value wore off, I ended up feeling like the book was a little too much “hey, look how weird my life was” and not enough substance.
I was a bit disappointed, but I didn’t want to give up on him yet….so I waited a couple months and read Dry, which, for me, felt like a big improvement. Burroughs was more insightful as he reflected on his time in rehab and his journey as a recovering alcoholic, and I found that I liked him much more and cared about what happened to him. The writing didn’t feel as forced or affected, and that made me happy. I really appreciate it when an author’s voice is honest and authentic, and though the memoir genre allows for some editing, conflation, confabulation, and artistic license, I think it’s still very important for the story to feel real and to be something readers can relate to rather than just be entertained by.
In June, shortly before the original version of this blog was born, I read Magical Thinking: True Stories, Burrough’s first collection of essays about his life. They were interesting and entertaining enough that I kept reading, but the change in format from linear narrative to humorous vignettes made me suspect that his editors or publicists had finally caught wind of the format that works so well for David Sedaris and suggested that Burroughs try it himself. It didn’t feel fresh or new or really very exciting…but I kept reading, which does say something.
So, since I’ve been here in Kansas City visiting my parents, and Possible Side Effects was one of the TBR books that I threw in my suitcase in a packing frenzy, I decided to give it a try. To my great pleasure, it started off surprisingly well.
In the first story, “Pest Control,” Burroughs tells us about the first time he heard of the Tooth Fairy (from his wealthy grandmother, who was appalled that his parents neglected to mention it to him) and how he became the only kid in history who ever prayed for the Tooth Fairy not to visit him. And in “Bloody Sunday,” he describes in full detail the time he got a nosebleed on a transatlantic flight and, as he hurried toward the restroom, covered in blood, was recognized by a fellow passenger who was reading Running With Scissors. He sums up his appearance with:
I looked like somebody who had caught a small rodent in the aisle and bitten its head off.
Now, that really paints a picture, as does the rest of his description of the event, and I found myself laughing out loud. I do appreciate Burroughs’s ability to take experiences that anyone else would be too mortified to reveal and turn them into something that is funny and human and oddly endearing. He is also one of the few authors—-really, one of the few people in general—-who can say things like
I am prone to envy. It’s one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory
and still be somewhat likeable. That’s a gift, people.
One of my favorite essays in the collection, entitled “The Wisdom Tooth,” describes an ill-fated vacation involving an inn decorated with creepy dolls, some questionable chowder, a broken tooth, and many examples of Murphy’s law at its finest and contains a hilarious description of Burroughs and his partner Dennis dreaming up creepy messages to write in their room’s guestbook. That brand of weirdness is something I can relate to.
The essays I enjoyed most appear early in the book, and, unfortunately, it goes downhill from there. Sure, there are humorous retellings of bad dates and samples of the personal ads Burroughs admits to writing while drunk and a history of Burroughs’s experiences as an amateur peeping tom (which tops out when he realizes his office overlooks Uma Thurman’s apartment), but there was something missing. I had several episodes of literary deja vu and repeatedly felt as though I had heard all of these stories before.
I get it. Burroughs had a genuinely traumatic childhood, a debilitating addiction, and a long string of awful experiences in between, and those are things worth talking about…but it’s getting kind of tired. This book didn’t leave me feeling like I knew Burroughs any better than I did when I finished the last one–we already knew that his mother was bipolar and that he was a flamboyant child and that he has intimacy issues and unrealistically high expectations and…well, you get the picture–and that makes me wonder what the point was.
Burrough’s writing is a decent diversion, and I do want to read A Wolf at the Table, so I’m glad I’ll be able to go into that book knowing that I’ve read his story in chronological order. However, I will be hoping that he returns to a more narrative format and drops some of the pretense and affectation that made it seem like he was trying too hard in Possible Side Effects. I was really hoping to like this book more, but I’ll have to leave it at 3 out of 5.
I read Running With Scissors and didn’t really enjoy it, but unbelievably, my 81 year old mother and 88 year old father loved it. I do remember there was some controversy about it.