With Father’s Day just around the corner, this is the perfect time (or not) for a heart-wrenching account of a dysfunctional father-and-son relationship.
In 2002, Augusten Burroughs became a literary sensation with his hilarious and horrifying memoir, Running With Scissors. Burroughs described how his mentally ill mother, obsessed with the idea of becoming a famous poetess, left a teenage Augusten with her dodgy psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, and his extremely eccentric family. Burroughs’s followup was the equally successful Dry, a wickedly humorous account of his years as an alcoholic ad executive and his subsequent journey towards sobriety.
Burroughs’s latest offering, A Wolf at the Table, is somewhat of a prequel to these works and a complete departure stylistically. Born into the “smoking, oily wreckage” of his parents’ already unravelling marriage, Burroughs recalls a childhood spent both fearing and adoring his emotionally abusive, alcoholic father, John Robison (Burroughs changed his name in 1984). “My father was a careful construction,” he writes. “A studied husk. That’s why when he smiled, it was wrong. The smile simply unzipped his face to reveal the darkness behind it.” Burroughs would still attempt to win his father’s affection by assembling elaborate collages to present to him when he returned from work, or creating a dog costume to wear after observing his father’s kindness toward the family pet. Only after an incident of extreme neglect during one of the family’s many separations does Burroughs turn away from his father, with a finality that extends to the elder Robison’s deathbed many years later.
Those readers who are accustomed to the full-on assault of Burroughs’s dark humour may be disappointed with this book. One of the things that Burroughs does best in his writing is to temper his intense personal experiences with outrageous flippancy, leaving the reader gasping both with shock and laughter at the pain Burroughs has experienced and his audacity in writing about it. There is no humour to help dull the pain this time, however, and the reader is left with only an account of the emotional damage inflicted on a small impressionable boy by a sociopathic parent.
Burroughs still has the power to charm, however, and his talent is most evident in the striking descriptions that brighten the often-dreary narrative. Upon his mother’s haggard return from a stay in a mental hospital, he describes her “cemetery mood” and writes, “I could so easily imagine a nurse’s aid[e] seeing a dark, tangled mass on the floor and sweeping it into a dustbin, not realizing it was my mother's spirit.” Even everyday items receive Burroughs’s writerly attention — he notes that his father’s Dodge Aspen is “so bare of features it didn’t even have an AM radio, just a blank metal panel where a radio should be, like an automotive birth defect.”
It could be that this book is Burroughs’s personal brand of therapy, revealing his emotional wounds to readers without hiding behind his usual humour. Occasionally this straight-up approach resonates: an episode near the book’s end, in which Burroughs meets a man who clearly loves his son, reduces the author to a helpless rush of sadness that is particularly raw and moving. The book’s frank revelations are a testament to Burroughs’s survival — and tremendous success — in the aftermath of a terrible childhood. It is the keenly felt absence of his trademark wit that results in a memoir that is merely sad instead of memorable.
