Were We Right?: Augusten Burroughs’s A Wolf at the Table
-- Publishers Weekly, 5/2/2008 1:24:00 PM
Running with Scissors author Augusten Burroughs centers his newest foray into his troubled childhood, A Wolf at the Table, on his relationship (or lack thereof) with his cruel and neglectful father. Burroughs’s fourth memoir is receiving a scattering of superlatives and jeers, with PW finding “enormous pleasure” in the book.
The New York Times: Janet Maslin: “[d}eterminedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and sometimes anything but credible.”
USA Today: Deirdre Donahue: “moving.”
Entertainment Weekly: Jennifer Reece: “not a single page rings true. C-.”
The Associated Press: “the melodrama is overwhelming. B-.”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Holly Silva: “more balanced, nuanced and believable.”
Here’s PW’s starred review:
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.
