| A Wolf at the Table |
Visit the A Wolf at the Table website. "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.
"Burroughs' 'Wolf at the Table' memoir is a serious departure...In 2002, Burroughs became the memoir "it" boy with his hilarious yet heartbreaking Running With Scissors...But this memoir is not at all funny. It's a moving depiction of fear and powerlessness from a child's point of view...In A Wolf at the Table, Burroughs paints a portrait of his father as a rage-filled alcoholic with a personality disorder. His health was poor. And his marriage to Augusten's mother was a nightmare of screaming and physical violence...But the most compelling aspect of Wolf is the way that Burroughs has left behind the campy humor of Running With Scissors. This is a serious book by a grown-up writer."
"Augusten Burroughs's much-anticipated new memoir begins with a chase. In a gripping prologue, we are alongside the pajama-clad 10-year-old as he races barefoot through the woods near his family's Massachusetts home, his enraged, alcoholic monster of a father at his heels...This scene, shocking and terrifyingly thrilling, hooks the reader immediately. It promises that Burroughs is about to take us on another rapid-fire, acerbic, so-horrible-it's-hilarious ride of our lives, the kind we've taken with him in both "Running With Scissors" and "Dry." Yet this is not that Burroughs...Burroughs is doing something new here: ripping the scabs off emotional wounds without his usual acidic humor to deaden the pain...Still, Burroughs retains his capacity to move the reader: There is gorgeous writing on every page...Clearly, this was not an easy tale to tell. "A Wolf at the Table" forces us to recognize the immense harm done to children who are menaced, abused -- or worse, ignored -- by their parents. They become haunted adults, wondering what they could have done to make themselves more lovable. The years go by, but they remain one baby step ahead of the beast from their past -- even if he's only a ghost now...Burroughs is to be commended for addressing this painful material head-on and with such sobriety..., [a] brave effort..."
"Memoirs about fathers and sons, says Burroughs, tend to be "advice or sports-towel-snapping things. Where's the book about the dad who didn't sit around with a Red Sox cap on, cheering with you?" That book is here, and it's an infinitely darker work than the author's previous takes on family dysfunction. Before his mother sent him to live with the loony shrink he immortalized in Running with Scissors, Burroughs was a kid at the mercy of a father he believes was a sociopath. "Dead," as little Augusten pronounced his name, showed so little affection for him that the boy made a stuffed dad with the real one's clothes and slept with it, secretly, for years. Through neglect -or worse- "Dead" killed his sons guinea pig and his dog. "Your father is dangerous," Augusten's mom warns: it rings true. Burroughs' famous humor is mostly absent from this account, yet Wolf is not a grim book. How did he survive? Contemplating suicide at 12, he imagines the thrill of leaping from a cliff, then realizes that afterwards "there would be no chance to...pull somebody aside and tell them what it felt like." Writing -luckily for him and us -helped save him."
"A Wolf at the Table," is...a powerful testament to the author's ability to create art from the leaden dross of a terrible childhood...Burroughs constantly yearns for affection and approval from his emotionally distant father. His mother can be loving, but she has her own mental demons and winds up briefly in a mental institution, leaving Burroughs in the care of his father, who has already proven that small things such as guinea pigs die when left alone with him...But as the story unfolds, the father's quotidian irritation and neglect evolve into something more sinister and terrifying...This looming threat of violence finally manifests in a drunken attack on Burroughs' older brother during which Burroughs, beside himself in fear and rage, begs his brother to shoot the father and put them all out of misery...Burroughs must spend the next several decades of his life coming to terms with the painful truths of his childhood...Memoirists are being required to defend the veracity of their work with increasing frequency these days...[I]t should be remembered that memoir is about memory and impression. It would be difficult indeed to doubt that the young Burroughs was terrorized by this man whom he once adored and whose love he always desired..."A Wolf at the Table" is a moving tribute to a childhood survived and a chilling documentation of parental power run amuck.
"With his new book, A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father, Burroughs breaks our hearts. Big time...Burroughs recounts a childhood spent both fearing and adoring his alternately distant and abusive father, John Robison...It's a powerful read, quick-paced and written with a matter-of-factness indicative of the age of its narrator at the time of the events but with the added wisdom of three decades of reflection. It delivers an overload of varying emotions, most of them inducing queasiness. And while it contains the expected varieties of heartbreak (the soul-crushing accounts of Burroughs' continued attempts to win his father's affection, such as constructing and wearing a dog costume because his father paid more attention to the family dog), it also goes to some unexpected places. Like Poe's House of Usher, the House of Robison falls into disrepair - literally and emotionally...Burroughs lightens the load, however, with a helping of humorous anecdotes and an economical writing style that gives just enough detail to express the book's gut-twisting emotions without tripping over its own language. The scenes play out like the silent images of a home movie, so that you can almost hear the machine-gun rattle of the spinning reels in the background. What gives the book its greater meaning, though, is Burroughs' willingness to take a longitudinal view of his father. Unlike many memoirs that entertain but fail to convey a message beyond the literal, Burroughs' takes us out of the house and into adulthood, describing moments from his relationship with his father, which could be described as strained at best. By doing so, he reminds us that our childhoods are always with us, like it or not. Leaving his father's home didn't make everything better. The dysfunction of the House of Robison is something Burroughs will always have to deal with, even after the publishing of this book. Whether that thought is tragic or comforting, A Wolf at the Table skillfully reminds us that the past never goes away. It's in our blood."
"Imagine all the terrible things that could possibly happen in childhood and you'll find them in Augusten Burroughs' newest memoir, A Wolf at the Table...Physical and mental child abuse. Spousal abuse. Animal abuse. Hints of sexual abuse. Malnutrition, guns, drugs, alcohol, decay, rape, illness and, yes, possibly even murder…Throughout the first 100 pages you may think, "OK, so your father didn't hug you enough." But it gets worse, much worse, as we knew it would...Burroughs dishes out exactly what his readers probably wanted...utterly overwhelming."
"As if taking cues from other exemplary literary memoirs, like Bernard Cooper's A Bill from My Father or Calvin Trillin's Messages From My Father, Burroughs has changed tone here, moving further from his brash and witty stand-up style of delivery toward something somber, elegiac and literary...Burroughs commands attention with a vivid, and at times distressing, portrait of his nuclear family -- a veritable Chernobyl waiting to happen...In being eloquent about his own sadness and pain, Burroughs provides damning testimony about his father's enduring legacy."
"Whether your childhood was a fairy tale or a horror story, you'll be engrossed by Augusten Burroughs' attempt to answer the question he first asked at age 12: Do you need a father to be happy? In A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (St. Martin's; $25), the best-selling author bravely lays bare his deepest yearnings and most frightening memories. Even fans of his previous work will be shocked by this story, the first chapter of a remarkable life."
"Augusten Burroughs delivers another gripping tale of family life gone off the rails -this time at the hands of his abusive, alcoholic, mentally ill father- in A Wolf at the Table. The struggle to squeeze a living reaction out of the stonelike patriarch presents itself in vivid detail as Burroughs tries everything throughout the years to make a dent -even dressing up like the family dog to win affection as a child. The book has less humor than his earlier efforts, due mostly to the authors' crushing (and very dark) realizations that he's far from the apple of his father's eye. And after the gruesome death of his beloved guinea pig, he actually wants the man dead -eventually, guns are drawn...No one does dysfunction like Burroughs."
"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."
Amazon.com has selected Augusten Burrough's A Wolf At the Table as one of their 7 Best of April titles.
"What's new and worthy is Burroughs' tone: more balanced, nuanced and believable. Still a lot of drama? Yes...As the pre-eminent writer of family dysfunction, Burroughs makes a convincing new case for the common heartbreak of distance between fathers and sons."
"Harrowing... Given the abundance of bad dads, many readers will flock to "Wolf at the Table" to compare and commiserate. (They are likely to "lose.")..."
"An achingly sad portrait of a boy desperately seeking paternal love."
"A sensational latter-day memoirist, Augusten Burroughs has enthralled a generation of readers with his telling of crazed episodes from a stranger-than-fiction life. Alongside David Sedaris, moreover, he has made a career out of transforming a distressing an often miserable past into tremendously captivating bestsellers."
"A disturbingly good read"
"There is a depth here that moves his prose to another level. He has written a chilling, dark and deeply unsettling book that is, nonetheless, compulsive reading and makes you look back on your own childhood and realist it wasn't that bad after all."
"A hauntingly well crafted account of his difficult relationship with his father."
"Just as some argue that the safest time to fly is after a crash, the best time to read a confessional memoir is the moment when every sentence is being tested by skeptics. And this book is the one to read...The king of the disturbing memoir."
"This book rounds out a remarkable literary achievement." |
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