I like Burroughs well enough, although no one will ever be as obsessed with him as my girlfriend. There is a great battle among fans of Rakoff, Sedaris and Burroughs, all gay, white, male, American* essayists who are neurotic about everything, yet overcome their perpetual discomfort to try incredible masochistic pastimes and then complain about them. Of these three, Sedaris is my favorite, Rakoff a distant second, and Burroughs a nearly invisible third. There's just something a little self-satisfied about Burroughs, a kind of smugness about his own clever pranks and plots. Nothing wrong with it, he's just the least appealing of an increasingly tedious trio.

* Yes, Rakoff was born in Canada, and I believe he has dual citizenship. But I count him as an American these days.

After reading Running With Scissors, I found I needed to read every subsequent memoir written by Burroughs. Too many questions left unanswered, or perhaps I found the characters populating his life story compelling. It's a good idea he divvied up his chaotic life into five memoirs--I've been told I should divide mine into five or ten (not that I can compare). This one bridges his past with his life as a copywriter in New York City and reads like a series of essays. His mother continues her psychotic slide and he tries dubious means of coping with life. Burroughs writes with his usual pathos and humor, but the pacing of each chapter begins to feel the same--always the ta-da line at the end, the epiphany, the joke. But, being a Burroughs' admirer, I read every essay down to the last punchline and enjoyed the experience.

Augusten Burroughs and I, in many ways, may have been seperated at birth (disregarding the age difference issue). We both think London is the perfect place and secretly wish were were British. (Why did we seperate anyway? Oh yeah...the freedom thing...) We are both more or less anti-social when it comes to...well, people...we are both totally creeped out by dolls and neither of us like to touch anything outside our homes without disinfecting them first. Most importantly, we worship our pets. (But I won't buy mine....) So, I think he's fabulous as a person, of course. :)

The essays in this book are funny, open, honest and in many cases, very, very sad. Burroughs has led an amazingly hard, sad life and I admire his ability to recognize that perhaps other people could learn from him and change their lives too...

The reason I didn't give this more stars (and only gave it a "liked it" rating) was because some of the essays, while poignant, were so overwhelmingly sad and I was looking for a book of funny to lift my spirits. He is funny and in places finds humor where I know I would not be able to were it me. I think he's a fantastic writer and I look forward to reading more of his works.

Though this book took a few stories to get into, once you make it through the first two to three chapters it really gets quite funny. I definitely found myself chuckling out loud a couple times. I was expecting this book to be a little darker, perhaps because I remember his other book Running with Scissors having some darker aspects to it, but it's really pretty light for the most part. I don't normally read short stories but I'm glad a read these, Burroughs really has a voice that stands out as his own.

Apparent brutal honesty of retelling stories of his life had me feeling a wonderful range of emotions. Interest, pondering, laughter, empathetic sorrow and pain, anger and a peculiar sense of justice.

He writes very well for a self confessed high school drop-out. Each chapter is an event from a period in his life, which he weaves into something which is eminently re-tellable.

Perhaps it is just my own sense of connection with events which had me nodding along between chuckles and often finding myself inadvertently making a mental note of a life lesson. Definitely an easy read and one i went into with no expectations or prior knowledge and have ended up excitedly wishing to share parts and reading out loud passages to friends and writing more than a couple of words of review.. Cheers Augusten :)

Turns out I'm not a fan. This is no wonder,as I am not a fan of David Sedaris, either; these two authors share a lot of similarities in my opinion. Both remind me of better educated Paris Hiltons. Both write with a smugness that I find distasteful. They both seem to share the disdain for America in favor of Europe and the laissez-faire attitude that seems to prevail there. They both assume that the reader knows who they are and have read all of their previous books, so therefore the reader knows all of their boyfriend's idiosyncrasies.

While reading this book, I came to realize that the stories had the potential to be very funny, but because of the author's attitude, I found myself not liking HIM. I stopped reading this book after I realized that. Because I have come to dislike the author as a person, his stories would have a difficult time becoming funny to me.

I loved this book, as I love the humor and honesty in all Augusten Burroughs books. He is pure genius - I've read Running with Scissors and Dry also, which was particularly wonderful. This a book of essays/memoirs from his life and he always presents his info in an interesting way as well as being blunt about his neurosis. All of this makes him a wonderful writer, but he's not for everybody I guess. One of the stories in this book was identical to a situation that I had as a teen -- first day on job. I also like David Sedaris - but only his first book. Burroughs is always good and I look forward to reading Magical Thinking and Sellavision. He really strips away the layers..

He is not my favorite writer. The anecdotes are supposed to be amusing and self deprecating but come off as being entitled. I can’t imagine emerging from his childhood unscathed and I don’t envy him.

I've never read this author before and picked it up at random at the library, and glad I did. Not only does he write that makes you feel like your part of his very dysfunctional life (and often times wished you were, but glad your not), your laughing along the way. His stories aren't the most impressive stories you will read but the way he grabs you from the first chapter makes you glad that you picked up this story and your reward will be a few chuckles to some outright laughter. I wish all of us could could embrace our crazy outright weird life the way he does. He writes so smoothly and vividly. He made a fan out of me. If you don't fall in love with him after reading this book then your more delusional than his crazy family.

All too many people lurch in life from one disaster (often self-inflicted) to the next, but few are able to write about their personal catastrophes as stylishly as Augusten Burroughs. Possible Side Effects brought to my mind the same sort of horrified hand-to-mouth laughter as the confessional intimacies of Jenny Lawson ("The Bloggess") and David Sedaris.

My God, why aren't these in America? Why did we ever split with Britain in the first place?
I began to suffer. I could buy a bag, but I knew what would happen. I would take them back to the room and within the space of four chips, I would become addicted. And then in four days, I would be three thousand miles away from more.
We have BBQ and Sour Cream and Onion and, wildly, Salt and Vinegar. We have "No Salt," as though that's an acceptable flavor.
And these loopy, gin-soaked Brits are whooping it up with chips in a Noah's Ark of animal flavors.
It made me sick with envy is what it did.
—"Bloody Sunday," p. 19

This paean to the variety of British potato crisps inspired me to purchase, for the first time, my own large bag of curry-flavored chips, fried in coconut oil (because we do have more choices in the States now than either he or I did growing up). Such is the power of Burroughs' prose.

Although he does frequently indulge in caricature and mockery of others, Burroughs is most savage when excoriating himself:

My years in advertising had taught me that categories abound. Long ago, America stopped being a "melting pot" and is, rather, a large land mass filled with tiny boxes, into which groups of people sit {sic}, labeled and ready for processing.
The thing is, I come from a family of Southerners. Racism is as much a part of my heritage as grits and incest. In fact, one of my relatives is on record for having purchased a slave from the ship Amistad—otherwise known as "The Black Mayflower."
—"Try Our New Single Black Mother Menu," p.223

I understand this admission—although I come from the only state in the U.S. to have seceded from the Confederacy, and my relatives were never wealthy enough to have owned other human beings, I was still raised south of the Mason-Dixon line, and my racist heritage is similarly shameful.

Even at my most callow and thoughtless, though, I don't think I would have just winged it with a sail-cutting knife, as Burroughs says he did (in "Unclear Sailing") on his first and only day as a sailmaker at the age of 18. That revelation really shocked me, more than just about anything else in Possible Side Effects.

What I'm saying is, you have to be prepared to do a lot of laughing and wincing (sometimes both within the same paragraph) if you're going to read this book. Those are the most likely side effects, though others are possible. You have been warned...

As posted in [http://www.amazon.com]:

If you liked *Magical Thinking*, then you'll like *Possible Side Effects*. However, I do have to say that *Magical Thinking* was funnier. Don't get me wrong, *Possible Side Effects* was funny but not as good as Burroughs' previous book.

Of course, Burroughs never runs out of things to say about his eccentric life. In this book, he talks about his grandparents, his fashion fetish of collegiate t-shirts, alcoholism, jobs and a few other topics.

Even though Burroughs wasn't as funny as his previous book, it's still an enjoyable read. Heck, he's so good that you can't put it down. He has an interesting way with words and sometimes it just leads to a chuckle or two.

This book was pretty funny...though not as strong as the three preceeding it. There were a few times where I really had to fight the urge to not laugh out loud on the bus. I would say it is a pretty solid follow up...much less shocking, but funny nonetheless.