Augusten’s Blog

“The biggest surprise, to me, is that he radiates trustworthiness: He seems open, unrushed, self-deprecating, and willing to discuss any subject with piercingly direct eye contact. He asks questions about my childhood, listens carefully to the answers, and follows up with more questions. He is unfailingly kind to waiters. His voice is dry, higher-pitched than I’d expected, and a little twangy, the product of growing up under highly educated southern parents in western Massachusetts…”

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The incident with the gun, my brother, our father, and me

In my brother’s new book, A Wolf at the Table, there’s a scene where we have a family fight, and my brother runs into my room. He grabs my gun, hands it to me, and says, “Kill him!”

When a reporter asked me about that scene, I said: It wasn’t as big a deal to me as it was to my brother. I’m eight years older, so my perspective is a lot different. And it was, after all, only a BB gun.

To my enormous distress, people have seized bits of that statement and used it to suggest that the scene, or even the whole book, is exaggerated and made up. It’s not. My brother, my mother, and I all agree on the essential truth of the book. We certainly agree that my father was frighteningly mean when he was drunk. And in those years, he was drunk every night, whenever he was home.

The only time he was sober was when he was at school, so his colleagues and students saw a totally different side of him. Luckily, I too saw that side of him later in life, after he stopped drinking.

The fact that my little brother – a small child at the time – felt the need to grab a gun to defend us says a lot about how life was at that time.

Fights with drunks can get ugly.

The fact that it was a BB gun is irrelevant to the true emotional tale my brother relates: I was holding our father at gunpoint. The fact is, my brother was terrified and thought that was the defense of last resort. So he got it, and gave it to me, because he believed I was his defender. And it worked. Our father went downstairs and things simmered down.

My brother also writes that I warned my father, “I keep the rifle loaded,” which I did. How many of you were proud teenagers with BB guns and air rifles? How many kept them loaded, in case a grizzly bear came through the door? How many of you can remember feeling like that?

As much as I am troubled by the scary stories from my youth, I feel I should share the story of why it was “only” a BB gun. And why we did not have a “real gun” in the house.

I wrote in Look Me in the Eye about how I grew up around guns. Down at my grandparents in Georgia, most every farmer or landowner had guns. Mine were no exception. When we moved to Massachusetts, my grandfather sent my father a gun, too. He sent him a WWII surplus Springfield bolt action rifle. Luckily, he didn’t send shells.

The gun arrived about the time my brother turned three. My father fell into a black depression, and talked of suicide. I wrote about some of those incidents in Look Me in the Eye. Here’s one that didn’t make the book:

My father would get drunk, and sit the gun on the floor, aimed at the ceiling. He’d be in his chair, at the kitchen table, with the old black and white TV in the corner. He’d drink his sherry, rest his head on the end of the barrel, and cock the gun and pull the trigger. Time after time after time. Yesterday, our mother told me she remembered going to sleep to the click of the empty gun. Frightened, she gave it to a friend for safekeeping. I have it today.

So there you have it. That’s the reason there was only a BB gun in our house.

There are a number of other inaccuracies that are being reported. One reporter said, [A Wolf at the Table] claims Robison put a cigarette out on Burroughs’ forehead. That’s wrong. That is in my book, in a chapter called The Nightmare Years, and also in my brother’s 2003 memoir Dry.

When I wrote that, my mother read it and said, I don’t remember that happening, but I just don’t know . . .

My first wife read it and said, Oh my, when you were seventeen years old you showed me a mark on your chest where he’d burned you with a cigarette. Don’t you remember? It was on you! Thirty some years later, spot has vanished and the memory has faded. So the evidence suggests that both my brother and I may have had cigarettes mashed out on us, and we’ve repressed the memories. Obviously people can have different and even contradictory memories of bad things. That’s how memory works. Saying we’re in disagreement about those points is simply untrue.

After reading this story, I hope you will re-read the epilogue to Look Me in the Eye, where I made peace with my father at the end of his life. Because that’s how I want to remember him today. People do change, and the last half of my father’s life – after we’d left home and he was remarried - shows that.

In closing, let me just affirm I am very disturbed to see my words taken out of context and used to fan the flames of controversy when in fact there is no controversy. My brother and I don’t have any dispute about the content of our books. Augusten and I may interpret the meaning of childhood experiences differently, but we do not disagree about the underlying events themselves. And those are the facts.

SOURCE: http://jerobison.blogspot.com

His readers respond

A thoughtful fan sent me this entry from a Junior Boy Reporter’s blog, gleefully recounting his forthcoming snarky review of WOLF for a rag called The Stranger in Seattle. I thought it was a rare and fascinating “behind-the-curtain” view of the caliber and intellectual prowess of certain book reviewers. Apparently, anybody can be one! His “review” of my book admittedly marks his “first real journalistic” (what a word) assignment. And possibly also his last.

“What I’m about to say might seem like shameless self-promotion. It might seem like the kind of crap you could read on the Starbucks blog or perhaps the MyObamablog (IS that a blog? I think I just made it up). But I must tell you the news because it’s exciting and you’re all friends, right? My first real journalistic assignment is going to be published in teh Stranger soon. It’s a piece I wrote about Augusten Burroughs’ new book called “A Wolf at the Table.” The book was terrible. Or was it? Maybe I shouldn’t say. Yet. In any case, this is exciting news, and hopefully Burroughs won’t hate himself even more than he probably does after he reads it. Yesh. His book was bad. I’m sayin’ it.”

-Steven Blum, The Stranger

A Son Peers at His Father and Finds a Sociopath

At 42 Augusten Burroughs is the first to admit he has written “more memoirs than anyone my age should be entitled to write.”

His fifth, “A Wolf at the Table,” comes out on Tuesday. But this new one, about his relationship with his father, breaks from the dark comedy that characterized the wildly popular “Running With Scissors.” Gone are the sharp one-liners, the exaggerated portraits and the wacky antics. In their place is a chilling and terrifying depiction of a soulless sociopath who can barely contain a murderous rage toward his youngest son and mentally unstable wife. It’s more Stephen King than David Sedaris.

(continue reading at The New York Times)

Ink work by Ben Reigle at luckystattoo.org
Visit his website here: benreigle.com

I had to fly to California to speak in Palm Springs. So I was sitting at gate ten of LaGuardia airport and I was on page 52 of my the new Elizabeth Berg novel, THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER I WANTED. It was the part where Earl takes Helen into the closet and she’s all, “Earl? I only got you a new pair of tan pants. That’s all I got you for Christmas. I’m sorry.” And I snorted and then tears started dripping onto the lenses of my glasses. I am holding this kitchen-yellow book with girly, scripty PINK type and hot PINK endpapers and I am CRYING like a girl. Naturally, the plane sat on the tarmac for like 100 hours and it took me a month to reach Palm Springs, but did I care? Did I care at all? Normally, this delay would make me homicidal, but I spent the entire flight consumed by this magnificent, beautifully written new collection by Berg. As many people know, I am obsessed with Elizabeth Berg. And even though no self-respecting man would be seen in public holding -let alone reading- a book with such a cover, I have no self respect so I did not care. Berg is like a some kind of sniper, with violets in her hair. She takes aim at your heart and then just opens fire. I thought about it and I realized, women love Elizabeth Berg? But men NEED her. I mean, the women in these stories attend WEIGHT WATCHERS meetings, ok? I have never been to a Weight Watchers meeting. I have never thought about a Weight Watchers meeting. But there I was going, “Oh no, you go…you go and have that cupcake, you deserve it! I love you!” I’m telling you. I know you’re like, “Uh, ok. A chick book with chicks who go to Weight Watchers? And buy charm bracelets? Not for me.” But I have had so many lugheads come up to me and say, “So I read that Berg lady you told me about and I was, like, crying.” That’s what I’m saying: MEN NEED BERG.