It's a lovely idea, though, naturally, it ends with Burroughs checking to see how much his own first editions are going for online and being smugly pleased with the results.īut most of these pieces are the stuff of light newspaper columns and as such would have worked very nicely: Augusten and his partner, Dennis, get a new puppy and it wees on the floor! Augusten and Dennis go on holiday, and all does not go well! Augusten helps his friend place a dating ad and gives her terrible advice! Which she follows! There is nothing wrong with this in itself, of course, but putting these pieces in book form and calling them essays raises expectations that are not met they feel bland and ephemeral, and you finish each one thinking 'So?' or 'And?' After going mad with his credit card at online book dealers, Burroughs begins to suffer anxiety that Updike will die in the night and it will be his fault. In it, a friend suggests that, what with Updike getting on a bit, Burroughs should invest in signed first editions of his books which will double in value once the novelist is no longer with us. The funniest piece, for me, is 'Killing John Updike', for the title alone. Many of the pieces have all the craft and insight of the average blog. After Magical Thinking, a collection of autobiographical pieces in which he appeared to be shamelessly imitating David Sedaris, Burroughs has more or less used up the rich comic legacy of his dysfunctional past, so that this latest collection, Possible Side Effects, is almost entirely confined to his day-to-day experiences in the present: a trip to a hotel, a visit to the doctor, the day he locked himself out of his apartment - things we all do. His second book, Dry, chronicled his young manhood as an alcoholic in advertising - a less singular experience, and consequently less interesting to read about.
The book Running With Scissors was a hit because, even in the tortured childhood memoir genre, where the ante is being upped from minute to minute, Burroughs did have a striking tale to tell (though apparently much embellished, according to the various characters who subsequently brought lawsuits) and he told it with an appealing dark humour.
Except that it's not unique any more, and only intermittently comical. As the film version of his first, bestselling memoir, Running With Scissors, prepares to open in Britain (after gruesomely bad reviews in the US), here comes Augusten Burroughs with yet more wry, comic tales of life drawn from his unique experience.
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