>>REVIEW
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS
Augusten Burroughs
St. Martin’s Press, 291 pp.
Memoirist Augusten Burroughs is somewhat of a publishing phenomenon, having turned his car wreck of a life into a string of harrowing, yet compulsively readable autobiographies that have spent a great deal of time on bestseller lists.
Burroughs’ first novel, Running with Scissors, chronicled a childhood with his delusional mother, who allowed him to be raised by a Dr. Finch, her wildly unorthodox psychiatrist. Finch believed in reading feces for guidance, encouraged Augusten in drug use and school absences, and allowed him to be molested by his adult son. Dry found Burroughs in his twenties, living in New York as a successful advertising executive and an alcoholic, making well over six figures and living in a squalid apartment filled with empty bottles. Magical Thinking is Augusten Burroughs at a good place in his life. He is sober, successful, living with his boyfriend Dennis, and writing the kind of delightfully twisted, self-deprecating tales – about Dr. Pepper enemas, psycho bosses, rodent executions, and love – that fill readers with both shock and glee. All three books are memorable for Burroughs’ intensely intimate, darkly comic literary gifts.
His latest, Possible Side Effects, is a short story collection which further illuminates the crazy episodes of his life, dipping haphazardly into both past and present. "Killing John Updike" finds Burroughs online with an author friend, plotting to collect the distinguished author’s first editions before he dies ("If I was going to spend two thousand dollars on a book about a rabbit, that old man better be dead by morning, or I was going to be furious"). "Getting to No You" involves the ultimate bad gay date, who confesses to constipation and the desire to become a whirling dervish. "The Wisdom Tooth" is a romantic vacation gone awry, when Augusten and Dennis find themselves at a New England inn, surrounded by the innkeeper’s enormous doll collection. In "Julia’s Child," a young Burroughs bids for his mother’s attention by pretending to host his own cooking show ("Next I filled the roasting pan with a liter of Tab, one of my mother’s favorite beverages.") Most poignant of all is "Kitty Kitty," Burroughs’s admission that he had to relinquish ownership of his pet dog because of his alcoholism, just as his mother gave Burroughs away when he was a child.
Though always amusing and occasionally provocative, some pieces in this collection seem forced, as though the author is trying too hard to match the laugh-out-loud observations of his previous novels. It feels like Burroughs has mined his devastating past for material, and now, experiencing a quiet, successful life, needs to return to the madness for inspiration. These stories are also prefaced by an author’s note, stating that "some of the events described happened as related; others were expanded and changed." This may be a sign of the times in the wake of the furor caused by James Frey’s embellished memoir A Million Little Pieces, but it gives a somewhat sanitized overall feeling that sticks in the reader’s mind.
Ultimately, however, these things are unlikely to deter Burroughs fans, who want to read stories about Junior Mints or hot cardiologists or incontinent dogs as only he can tell them. Wherever Augusten Burroughs goes next, it’s unlikely to be a dull trip. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.