I was surprised to find, at the back of this book, so many rave reviews (or at least passages thereof) published in impressive places, including both The New York Times and The NYT Book Review. I found the whole thing glib and shallow. I'm not especially concerned with how much of this "memoir" is historically accurate; I know there was a legal suit about alleged fictionalization and defamation in Running with Scissors, and I figure most memoirists deploy some artistic license whose extent readers aren't in a position to evaluate. The disappointment for me was the utter superficiality of this story. Burroughs doesn't owe readers a tale of salvation or transformation, but I can't identify a single change or insight derived from the experiences narrated here. Why bother telling a story of alcoholism, sobriety, love, and loss, if none of those experiences has any particular impact that the book is going to record? Both in dialogue and in narration, Burroughs boasts repeatedly of his "shallowness"; I agree. But I have no idea why a shallow human being should want to write a memoir, or why anyone else should want to read it.

3.5 ⭐️

5 stars. The memoir of an alcoholic gay man in New York. This book has taken me on a journey of despair through dive bars of New York City to rock bottom. It has made me laugh, get choked up, look away in abject horror. Brutal honesty, irony, and the wittiest of observations. I have been enraptured. This is a book with grit and heart.

Okay, I didn't finish this one. I got about halfway through and had to put it down because I reached my maximum amount of frustrated sighs per book (20).

I have several problems with this book. First of all, it says on the cover that it is a memoir, but Burroughs takes way too much license with dialogue and description. Although he states several times that he has always kept a journal, many of the details either have to be or better be made up. Here's an example of a detail he recalled that I really hope he made up: "When I stand up, I bring my hand around to touch my back where it had been in contact with the tub and my back is cold, like a dead person." That sentence is clunky, no doubt, but the real problem is: who in the hell remembers, twenty years after the event, feeling his back and thinking it felt cold "like a dead person" (by the way, you mean corpse, right?). Or, if we take into account that he kept a journal, why would he write this observation down? This completely unnecessary made-up detail is unoriginal at best and cloying sentimentality at worst.

Second of all, and the cause of most of my frustrated sighs, is Burroughs' excessive use of over-the-top metaphors, similes in particular. It was getting to the point where there would be at least one bad metaphor per page. And believe me, I love a good, well-thought out metaphor, as it can add insight and universality to writing. These metaphors, though, seem to serve no purpose than either to shock the reader or to prove how hilarious and cool Burroughs is. Here are some god-awful similes:
- "When I say 'rehab' I raise my chin, as though talking about the Oscars." [Maybe I have to be a gay man to get what this is supposed to look like?]
- "Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion." [Ooo how scandalous!]
- "Paul concentrates, hard. He looks as if he can't decide between a vodka tonic or a screwdriver." [That kind of decision does take quite a bit of hard concentration...]
- (he is imagining what AA meetings are like) "Maybe there's even a secret handshake, like the Mormons who also don't drink." [What the hell is he talking about?]
- "So when you combine alcohol with a slob, you just end up with something that would appall an self-respecting heroin-addicted vagrant." [Wow, with one sloppy metaphor, Burroughs managed to elevate himself to be much superior to heroin-addicted vagrants and equate himself to the poor guys.]
- "In the shower I think about how I'm a drunk that doesn't get to drink. It seems unfair. Like keeping a Chihuahua in a hamster cage." [That makes NO sense at all.]

The third major flaw with this book is found on page 104: Burroughs has just arrived at his very first AA meeting, and the first thing the chairman of the meeting says is, "What you see here, what you hear here, stays here." Burroughs then spends the next four pages relating one woman's personal account of her struggle with alcoholism and her recovery. So here is the dilemma: either Burroughs is breaking that sacred rule or he is making up everything that happens in rehab and AA meetings. Undoubtedly he changes names, but I still think that is unfair to the other people in rehab and AA members who are only sharing their very personal stories because they know it is verboten to, say, publish these stories in a book. If he is making up these people and their stories, then perhaps he should call this book a fictionalized memoir.

A minor detail: when Burroughs checks into rehab, he is placed in the detox room. And yet we have absolutely zip description of what it felt like to go through withdrawal. In fact, the lack of physical description (as in, what Burroughs feels physiologically) makes me question the truth of Burroughs' account. Why doesn't he even mention what it felt like when he initially stopped drinking in rehab? If he didn't feel anything, which I would find difficult to believe as he claimed to drink a liter of Dewars nightly AND was allergic to alcohol, then wouldn't it be worth mentioning that he miraculously had no physical withdrawal symptoms?

I gave this book two stars instead of one for this reason: I think that Burroughs' goal in writing this memoir (and likely his other memoirs, though I have not read them nor do I have any intention of reading them now) is to yank an emotional reaction from his audience. If that is indeed his goal, then he has succeeded with me. I'm not sure Burroughs cares at all that my reaction is that I want nothing to do with him or his book(s).

Ever wonder why John Elder Robison (Look me in the Eye) snapped out of his Asperger's as a young adult? Simple.

Booze.

It ran in the family: in all its other members.

It was like ice water on his childishness.

John's half-brother Augusten wrote this book about those old days. Now you know why the name of that sixties song is Days of Wine and Roses...

Cause all Augusten saw (for it ran in the family) were the Roses in the drink, leading him ever on and on...

Until he hit Rock Bottom.

And became Dry by choice.

Alcohol's hook is the Roses. But life's not all fun 'n games.
***

My friend Larry (Proud Father-Confessor of various Friends of Bill W) was defiantly Dry (at least I, not being one of those AA Friends, never heard otherwise):

To the extent that he had lost the unforced joie de vivre of his inner child. His tough coming of age had spawned inner fury.

Enter his green new boss: me. I had 'saved' my inner child at my own violent coming of age: So it now ran roughshod over my life, wreaking rack and ruin: as half a bipolar persona. My dark side I suppressed.

So we were immediately at loggerheads. You see, we were each other's Jungian Shadows: each was the self the other publicly suppressed. At great cost, I might add.

The result? We resolutely forced ourselves to live in our daylight selves.

And while I became more conflicted, strangling my dark side, Larry became more stridently raunchy and belligerent. He reminded me of McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest.

When we parted at retirement, we were still uneasy buddies, though.
***

Three years ago Larry called me again. He was dying of mouth cancer (he was a lifetime smoker). But there was a different, more human timbre in his voice. It was a sense of peace.

Small wonder, really: he had performed a lifetime of service for Bill W.

He was an eminence grise for so many engineers who had needed his help at work.

He was a lifetime lover of his dear wife and provider for his two kids.

He was a beautiful guy.

And now - at last - his inner child was calling him Home.
***

Yes, and Augusten Burroughs went Dry too.

And I too went dry - around 2010, though I missed my two daily shots of bourbon.

You see, those two shots had become a quart.

So by losing we Won.

My thanks to Larry, too.

You know, this memoir is to Die For, it's so good.

And so sadly hilarious and so Downright Brave.

And so Unabashedly, Deucedly Human.

Like my friend Larry at the end.

And like me.

And, maybe my positivity had helped.

For that day I told him I was dry, too.

And he had stayed Dry and loved that freedom.

At LAST we had connected. It was priceless.

*****

FIVE HUGE STARS, friends (Count 'em)!

It's so good, and you'll love it.

Running with Scissors takes a group of messed-up characters and portrays them (mostly) for laughs. Dry takes a group of messed-up characters and shows us how tragic they are. It's deadly serious this time.

Most moving is the way Augusten portrays himself. He's merciless in showing us what he's become, the walls he's put up, the denial he's in. Tough to read and easy to read all at once. Fundamental truths, and possibly his crowning achievement.

this guy is a kind of a depressing wreck, and not as funny as everyone said he would be. Like if Anderson Cooper were a drunk. Boring.....

Not only was this novel enjoyable, but it was able to keep me interested throughout his entire journey. Seeing that Burroughs was capable of overcoming his alcoholic desires, it gave me an idea of how rehab had affected him, but upon finding out Burroughs situation with Pighead, it showed how he didn’t let his temptations define him. It made me want to continue reading up until the ending. However, I disliked how Burroughs skipped a chunk of time at the end. I feel like knowing what happened would've showed us what he had face.

Certainly entertaining, but Dry is overwhelming in its superficiality.

Got a good laugh while reading this. Funny!!!!

Won through goodreads giveaway

This, my second Augusten Burroughs read, just left me so satiated. His writing oozes charisma, surehandedness — despite the fact that this was only his first memoir, written before Running with Scissors but published second. And having spent weeks with him now, listening to his genial reading voice on my daily commute, I honestly kind of feel like we're bosom buddies at this point.

Inadvertently, I seem to have embarked on a theme of reading addiction memoirs over the past year or so. This genre compellingly lends itself to a dissection of one's most grisly shortcomings and darkest moments of demoralization, which is a motif I can really get behind. Being the addiction-memoir expert that I've now become, I was actually prepared to downgrade Dry a star or two because the beginning really glossed over the horrors of alcohol abuse and withdrawal, and Burroughs' experience of getting sober was just a little too suspiciously pat and enviable for its ease. Thankfully, shit got real by the last third of the book, resulting in an ending that was just sublime and cry-inducing. I hope it really happened just like that.

One of these days I will get back to my real reading. Listening to audiobooks feels like cheating. For the timebeing, I'm going to be happy to forget why I'm in the car and where I'm going (work) every morning as I listen to the next Augusten Burroughs book.

Dry, by Augusten Burroughs is empowering and a more realistic memoir of sobriety and the struggles and hurdles he must endure to stay sober. Augusten grieves the loss of alcohol, living life without it is equal to losing that good old dependable friend. A new battle in life has commenced. Augusten is forced to examine his life, to get a microscopic view of it and additionally address all of those emotions and feelings that were trapped inside his heart and soul like an uncorked bottle of wine under pressure. This book was like a fine wine, but instead of alcohol running through your veins it is replaced with a warm feeling in your heart.

The prose was powerful, intoxicating and exhilarating and I was rooting for Augusten right from the very beginning and it is so well written that you feel you are on the path toward sobriety right along with him. From his forced incarceration at rehab, the reader is there walking in Augusten’s shoes and you too loathe the person who is trying to sabotage his recovery, however, Augusten falls from grace by his own doing and you too feel his pain coupled with disappointment and emptiness. It takes guts and courage to be open and honest about your demons. This was a great read !!