This book wasn't nearly as good as his first. The humor is lacking and his adult life story, although entertaining, was sad but without the dark and biting humor of his first memoir. I would recommend it only for those who have read the first book and want to find out how he ended up, which was also a bit disappointing. Overall, the writing style is lacking in quality and the story is one that can't add up to his other work. He is no David Sedaris!

What more can be said about Augusten Burroughs? He is an amusing mess!
If half of the information in his memoirs is true, I will give him five stars for his survival skills. If his memoirs are later discovered to be false,I will give him five stars for creativity and fantastic story telling.I can't put this book down.

I haven't read their books, but it seems that his mother and brother are capitalizing on family dysfunction as well. They all make me feel extremely boring and sane.

**WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS**

Here is another book from a pile I nabbed off a girl I worked with that had to get rid of stuff to move to Canada. Based off the back cover I knew it was about a guy in New York who had a drinking problem, went to rehab, returned to New York, and then have to try and live sober. It is those things, but much, much gayer.

I will note that in the beginning of this book, there is "AUTHORS NOTE: This memoir is based on my experiences over a ten-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events."

In other words giving him license to basically write a fiction novel loosely based off of personal experiences. If I did my review based off of his Authors Note I would give this book 1 Star. I will review it without the authors note however and give it two. This is my reason why:

Parts of the first half of this book and the end I thought were good although it is very obvious that most of it is very embellished on and later upon doing research I see this “memoir” book for what it is. There are many holes in it and one thing I had a problem with is where he says that when he goes into rehab he was drinking a full bottle of Scotch a night along with 11 Benadryl’s because he was "allergic to alcohol". If you are drinking a bottle of Scotch a night along with that many allergy pills for months on end then all of a sudden have to stop and in your first night sober, your first night in rehab, followed by a forced 29, you would be a complete mess going through the many stages of alcohol withdrawals. There is no mention of any of this and he was fine enough on his first night that it didn't require any detail in his memoir. At the end of the book he talks about these things where he goes through them but it sounds more like he’s listing symptoms he read off Wikipedia.

This is my problem with this book; it glosses over the actual real parts of alcoholism (until the end) and focuses more on having crazy crushes on boys. Halfway through I thought this book is a writer writing about hooking up with dudes under the guise of an edgy alcoholic recovery tale. People eat up memoirs about addicts, and killers, and dudes in prison. Maybe it makes them feel like they’re not so tragic after all. Sort of a self help book by comparison. I think that this was the plan with this book. I’m not saying these things didn’t happen, I just think it was crafted and embellished and a better editor should have fixed this if they wanted it to be more realistic.

When the book is not about alcoholism and the struggle of being sober, it’s really just a teenage Stephenie Meyer (Twilight) style gay romance book and I had to skim over quickly a lot of the parts where he is writing just like her. He even says on page 132 “People often compare gay guys to teenage girls and they are right, I realise now.” He also talks about his hatred for Mormons, which all I have to say is, well, you can’t knock them too hard, because you write like one. (Stephanie Meyer)

The part of the book where he is talking to the German guy in a meeting for a beer advertising campaign constantly calling him “the Nazi” is the part I realised I hated the guy writing this book. I was going to give it three stars based on the titbits of addictive facts and solutions and helpfulness this book can be to people with problems with addiction (which it IS good for) but no, Augusten (real name Christopher Robinson) works in advertising. He spins. He dramatises. That’s his personality. He says so in the book. It’s who he is. And at the end I think he is just another phony writer with marketing experience along with a team of editors and a publisher to create a book James Frey style. (A Million Tiny Pieces) I think he's trying to be a cross between Chuck Palahniuk and David Sararis and fails.

Burroughs wrote Running with Scissors which mass book consumers rave about. I will never know because I'll never read another book by this man. Both books are marked to be made into movies and/or Showtime dramas, which doesn't surprise me. The masses love their junk food.

“I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”

Wow, I loved this book. Intense, and beautifully written. I was completely caught up in Augusten’s character arc (can we call it that in a memoir?). His internal dialogue throughout this story is profound - and at some points hidden behind humor. I both laughed and cried - Would absolutely recommend.

Snot yourself with hysterics kind of laughter.

Augusten Burroughs did the impossible by making alcoholism (and his struggles with it) both interesting and funny.

I've read this book twice. Once almost a decade ago. To me then, it what a very good book but I did not have the connection to the story then that I do now.

Since the first time I read the book, I dated an alcoholic who in retrospect seemed to suck everything out of our relationship like they sucked every ounce of liquor from the bottle.

This book went from being interesting and hilarious in turns to being exactly what I needed. I actually read this book while still in that relationship and it more than anything made me realize that I was completely wrong in my approach.

Burroughs is heartbreakingly frank in this book and you feel like you are going to the depths of hell and then coming back with him every time he scrapes his way out.

This book moved me to actually help my partner and in doing so I lost them but they didn't lose their life like I am certain they would have if we had kept going the way we were.

It is not often you can honestly say a book was powerful enough to actually help you save someone's life.

Well. That was a bit of a depressing book. But also very raw and moving.

Dry was about Augusten Burrow’s struggle with his inner alcoholic, his quest for love, and his encounter with loss. Written in his sarcastic, pessimistic tone, the prose was beautiful yet haunting. I chuckled a few times at his dark humor. The writing was wordy at times, but he really opened up and examined his feelings to produce this extremely honest and harrowing book.

This book will truly take you into the mind of an alcoholic both during his sobriety and relapse. It will make you feel uncomfortable, much in the way I imagine he felt during this time in his life. I can’t say I loved it but I was captivated by his story. It pulled my heartstrings in the worst way.

I don’t really have much to say about it, it could’ve been less wordy, as I personally don’t care for mundane, extraneous details. It read more like a novel than a memoir. But it was still a engrossing read, even in the darkest sections. It’ll sit with me like a bad taste in my mouth, but I think that is the purpose that the book serves, to illuminate the struggles of an alcoholic.

I think I would better enjoy his memoir, Running With Scissors, because the inner-monologues about drinking got a bit repetitive.

It took me awhile today to put together that I'd first read his brother's book when, as a teacher, I read about 30 books on autism.
I can only barely recall certain things about the family in that-darn bad memory. Did not connect this to this writer then. His brother's book, in a way, was a good read. Helpful for my thinking about autism.
Then after finishing this book I read his mother's blog and webpage and the poems are good. I realize I haven't read "Running With Scissors" when everyone else has, but I read the wiki on it tonight, three interviews with him too including VFair. I read his commentary on his mother. A lot of real bitterness.
But I have to say that whatever they did these parents and kids managed to get into the highly published category.
You or I write about difficult childhoods- it remains babble on a blog. So, somehow I wondered about that. Perhaps in one of the slew of memoirs that Burrough's family have out there- they can consider doing one that could be called " On Plugging Ourselves With Knives" -on just exactly how all this got to print and how a family got so embedded in the notion of being heard just for being-they lead the pack for me right now. Yikes. I'd find that interesting as a place to start. You wonder at a certain point how many different ways one family can mine their years together where things "didn't go well."

Basically for me, here's my story. (Let's see if this way of going holds for the audience)
I had a good friend that finally I just could not take any more. After 16 years I realized I was tired. She's a failed psychologist and a public school teacher that feels she's been wronged all her life. She'd like a rich husband, furniture from Pottery Barn, wealth and to be recognized as smart. Anyway, over time, I was sharing with her a complicated story of someone I was writing to on-line and the fact they were then shocking me by writing they were in re-hab. She worked for awhile as a rehab counselor until she had a crack up and went into teaching in public school-slumming it as she says. I was wanting to know more about addiction, re-hab, AA and so on to understand better the experience I had of this person. Because I realized I had missed something very important.

She kept insisting, as she has insisted, I read Burroughs. Read "Dry." Which clearly she loved. I get why she'd love him. Gutting his family, the deep resentments, the tone of his work, his borderline personality...all of that would be perfect ground for her. Here is someone not worried about the other guy- and terrific at justification. Who admits to things like drinking- with the agenda of procuring your money, attention and to gain sympathy, because, after all he found out life is very unfair. She must read him in utter awe. His life is what she'd like to do. Her drama, sense of exaggeration, the need to tell and retell and tell some more to reshape history. It's all up her alley.
So I didn't read it.
I didn't feel like it.

But after I decided to stop this friendship I thought-it's summer-I'll read it. I am now free from the thirty or forty- five to ten hour phone calls if I say I read it-listening to her talk about her-her damage, her feelings, her reliving what no longer even resembles what she lives.

"Dry" is a recounting of a person who did a lot of stupid things, most especially drinking to the point of nearly extinguishing their humanity. And who handled some bad stuff badly and hurt themselves rather critically. I have no idea at all if what's left has hope-I think he's really so broken- to continue to give him so much attention-it seems practical to do it with a warning label. Attention:Memoir written with an agenda.
I don't think it's such an accomplishment not to understand compassion, loyalty, love, another, generosity of spirit, humility, I don't think you can then listen to him fumble around in a self help position as if he's doing this for YOU. J*sus you must be kidding me. I think he's really desperately ill. But that said, Dry is sarcastic, which is called humorous, it reveals his story of a rehab experience, his recounting of ways to sc*ew up, his insensitivity, his excuses, his damage, his trauma, very little of his understanding what he's missing-a dry martini for sure-thrown right into your eyes. It tells about how he functioned when he had to become sober-which we must assume happened-though not from this, somehow later, and his friend who you see no reason would be a friend nor would you want to friend either really-is dying in the book, then too a rather crappy story of his addiction like affection for a gorgeous guy in the right after rehab days- that he takes up with in therapy who is a crack addict-so he can throw in the sex for more degradation.... That relationship doesn't "work out." Surprise?

I don't know. I just read in an interview that Burroughs wants people to look at themselves after reading this-to look at their addictions-you know-to go somehow help yourself. Objectively-let's face it- he wants you to look at him. Augusten wants to be a rock star.

I don't think he gives a rat's *ass if you are struggling, frankly, and I think he tells you that in ways you can look at objectively. He is broken. And he's not willing to jettison how. But I'll give you my two cents on where to look. Can you show me one place in this book where this person makes you feel real connection to something like a celebration of life, to joy, caring, not that he finally took some interest in his dying friend by recounting he cleaned his poop-oh poor noble suffering Augusten-I mean where you feel that he honestly feels someone else is more important than he is?
I can't.
I just feel like here's an ad man-empty-is selling me this stuff to get wealthy, and to be famous. For the attention.


I don't see him actually sponsoring people, which would be free and take time, or going to work in anonymity for the rest of his life on skid row with addicts-which is actually doing the work, or even talking about it as I know from several friends as it can be to dedicate a life to this...this for me is a lot what I think of when I think of good old Dr. Drew. Because that's what real insight would bring, over accumulation of wealth- I feel him sensationalize the 2000 bottles of whatever as he recounts the old days of addiction for the audience. I suppose I should disclose that I think he's mean, I think he's angry and I think he is really afraid of being an utterly worthless bast*rd-and there's not a lot here to point away from him being more like his parents as he states them than not...

Ok. Did I get a picture of rehab? Not really.
Do I better understand an alcoholic? Are they really "a type" I think about it. I think about reductionism. This book hinges on that.

I don't know. The thing is, I really don't understand from this. I may have missed something, but I don't think for all of this it's getting to what I was looking to read. It would seem to me that a person falls into these things to feel better, to cope-to deal with fears, fear of death so on, to distance from overwhelming pain and grief. Maybe to even escape real self evaluation..

I started with my friend, I'll end there- because I see they have similar issues. And I may see this because I glimpse my own self. In her case she speaks of her great authenticity, her personal insights, her depth of growth but, truthfully? I think she functions in incredibly controlling, dramatic, self-involved, emotionally exhausting, stage-like ways that demand her performance and everyone else is either adoring audience- or don't exist for her. What's the difference here? Burroughs is quoted in interviews, in the text , and in other piece I found today of his memoir-ettes- as so proud of not giving a shit about what anyone thinks (the road to confidence don't you know-such a perversion of Zen I still can't believe he calls this being in the moment), cutting off a relationship with a mother- long a serious stroke survivor -and my gosh he's just cruel in what he says. My former friend-terribly proud for not raising a finger to help her presently dying mom(but loving to use her as an excuse to miss week's of work to go somewhere else to work on her second run at a PHD)-an alcoholic mom-one she let raise her daughter to age nine when her mother wanted custody and she in a fury took back on what was her responsibility in the first place.As she tells everyone how she was a self reliant "single mom"- well, ok, only kinda. What I see in her is no ability to recognize what she received- I saw that echoing in this memoir where there is just so much that needs serious therapy and reduction to what he smirkingly asserts and what is.Can anyone really miss what that stuff on sally Struthers says about him. Mean. I did reflect. I am, and have been, thinking that all the memoir writing in the world is not the same as honest communication and a little bit of forgiveness and honesty.

It's not easy to resist re-writing history, it is about saying "I was," but...there is an awful lot to be said for caring more about who you hurt over who hurt you.

After reading Dry I went over to Cedar Tavern for a martini. I don’t normally drink martinis, but according to Augusten Burroughs, the famous Cedar Tavern on University Place in Manhattan serves huge ones (“enormous; great bowls of vodka soup”) - so you get the most of what you pay for. But as it turned out their martinis are actually rather small, the opposite of Burroughs’ claim. And the bartender on the second floor told me that the martinis have been the same size for at least five years since he began working there. So what the fuck is Burroughs talking about?
Not that I was surprised by this. While reading Dry – a “memoir” about overcoming the “disease” of alcoholism - I couldn’t help but think Burroughs had, um, invented many of the book’s anecdotes and conversations. The Cedar Tavern trip confirmed the suspicions.
Do a little research and discover the writer Augusten Burroughs as a liar on many levels. First, his real name is Christopher Robison. I can’t fully read his twisted mind, but it’s pretty clear the name-change is supposed to lend his authorial presence more grandeur. Is he trying to sound aristocratic? Sophisticated? British? As if he were William S. Burroughs’ son? Or what? You really should know you’re on the wrong track when you do the opposite of Mark Twain, who changed his high-sounding given name of Samuel Clemens into something people like Augusten Burroughs would likely describe as common.
About half of Dry is dialogue, and I wondered how Burroughs could recall all those intricate conversations, word for word, especially if he was drinking a liter of scotch every night, as he claims. We aren’t even given any prefatory disclaimer, as memoirs often issue, about how the conversations are recalled to the best of the author’s ability. Here’s a typical exchange (note that “Hayden” is a friend Burroughs met at their Minnesota-based rehab clinic):

Hayden is aghast. “That seems hostile,” he says.

“Rick’s a fuck. He’s a homophobic closet case and he hasn’t got an ounce of talent. He just hitched his wagon to Elenor years ago and she’s too busy to notice he’s as dumb as a box of hair.”
Hayden takes a long sip of water. “You have to keep an eye on this Rick person.”

For starters, even if you had remembered saying something as retarded as ‘dumb as a box of hair’ you wouldn’t publish it for the world to see, would you? Anyway, that’s simply not a line someone just improvises in the middle of a chat. That’s a line a bad writer cooks up because he can’t think of anything else to put down on the page. Hayden taking a ‘long’ sip of water (rather than, say, a short sip) is a nice touch, don’t ya think? That’s true literary talent right there for you.
The only part of Dry I didn’t hate is the very beginning when Burroughs is still routinely getting shit-faced. The buzz is officially killed on page 33 when he checks into rehab. It doesn’t even get dimly interesting again until page 257 after Burroughs falls off the wagon. The 200 or so pages in between are of course replete with a lot of AA/rehab talk and sermonizing. But mostly for Burroughs, the sober pages are just an excuse for the author to tell us all about himself and his dull relationships with co-workers and boyfriends. Unlike some of his fellow AA friends, he says he has no trouble staying sober, and even quickly stops attending meetings, so that he can instead focus the narrative on the drama of his relationships, whether we like it or not. Alcohol is rarely mentioned during these pages except when Burroughs feels the need to remind the reader that this is still a story about alcoholism. For instance, somewhere in the middle of the book, he concocts a tale about how he once went to a bar by himself and almost ordered a beer but then pulled himself together at the last second, settling for a Diet Coke. We are supposed to care and empathize with what is obviously an imagined scene. And then he’ll end certain sections by pretending to have a craved a drink at whatever point he’s at in his fascinating relationship memoir: “I have a sudden longing for a Cape Codder,” he’ll tell us, out of nowhere, leaving it at that. In hindsight, I realize these lines are intended to foreshadow his eventual return to drink. This is a story after all, so it really doesn’t matter if any of those longings actually happened.
In one scene after he quit drinking he describes emptying a bottle of scotch into the toilet: “I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, [sic] is of course, because I truly do not know myself. I cannot be sure I won’t attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.”
Sorry folks, but I’m just not buying this schlock. And I’m happy to say that I didn’t buy this schlock – the book was given as a gift. One flush wouldn’t get rid of the booze?? One flush wouldn’t prevent Burroughs from sticking his face into the toilet bowl to drink the (now alcohol-free) water? I don’t know how anyone could believe any of this. To begin with, Burroughs wasn’t that bad an alcoholic. He wasn’t knocking back cologne or anything. He’s a rich-boy, then advertising copywriter whose worst offense was to overindulge on martinis and Dewar’s, with perhaps a little blow on the side. If you quit that, you don’t fall off the wagon by drinking toilet water. You simply go to the liquor store and buy another bottle.
And I think this yarn is the winner: He tells us that his spacious Manhattan apartment is “clean and modern in design” except that it is ridden with empty liquor bottles. “Three hundred one-liter bottles of scotch…And when I used to drink beer instead of scotch, the beer bottles would collect. I counted the beer bottles once: one thousand, four hundred and fifty-two,” he writes, expecting to horrify us. Now, I don’t believe any of this for a second, but if it is actually true, then the trouble here is that Burroughs is just a fucking nutcase, and alcoholism is the least of his problems. Think about it: he spends his time inventing stories that he passes off as biography. That’s pretty twisted if you ask me.
Burroughs himself tells us that he didn’t even realize leaving thousands of empty bottles on the floor was abnormal, until the subject was brought up in rehab. He also pretends to have not known that the very purpose of rehab is to make people dry. Without a trace of irony, Burroughs writes, “Sober. So that’s what I’m here to become.” Yeah right, like he didn’t know. For some reason, I can’t help but think that this sort of contrived stupidity plays well with the American public.
So here’s my verdict on this book: Like other “memoir” specialists Dave Eggers and more notoriously James Frey, Burroughs’ only goal is self-promotion. The book is a con job written for the sort of people who consider themselves hip and liberal but secretly watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. Ostensibly the memoir is about alcoholism but like I said that’s not what it’s really about. The only subject discussed at length is Augusten Burroughs and all of his tedious relationships. “Dry” is definitely the operative word here, but not for the stated reason. Alcohol is just the decoy plot, so that the author and publisher can rationalize the appearance of yet another Burroughs reflection on his ordinary or otherwise tiresome life. There are no ideas in this book. No insights. No worthy discussion of booze and drugs. It is shallow, written, apparently, for fans of Elle, People and Time magazines and for Oprah Winfrey, as the laudatory quotes on the back of the book indicate. And this is what pathetically passes for good, edgy, humorous writing in America these days. And I suppose the question of whether it’s memoir or as I argue fiction is ultimately trumped by the unavoidable conclusion that this book is quite simply the literary equivalent of dog shit, not fit for consumption by anyone who has taste, never mind an ability to detect fraudulence.

I am a memoir junkie. I thought this one was raw, funny, and really great.

Sharp, candid, and surprisingly poignant...

The fact that I finished this book in one day probably indicates that I enjoyed it. Indeed, the only novels that I recall where I truly laughed my head off were from chick-lits, trivial as that may sound. But, really, Burroughs has managed to be disarmingly droll while being frightfully honest and self-deprecating. I can't attest if that's from being gay, the result of coming from a dysfunctional family, or perhaps from working in advertising (in New York, no less).

What made this story interesting for me was the way he narrated his excruciating battle with alcoholism, that even someone who doesn't suffer from that ailment can actually empathize with him. Definitely he refrained from being too long-winded about it, avoiding the pitfall of letting his story become boring or monotonous--his cracks about himself, his fellow addicts, down to the closet case that is his boss, openly drew chuckles from me. There was enough balance of falling into bouts of introspection as well as allowing the story to progress via the lively dialogues with the equally captivating secondary characters--the tragedy that is Pighead, the complexity and apparent exceptionality that is Foster, and the oddity namely Greer, among others. A guilty enjoyment for me as well was the encounter with the German advertising client who unwittingly provokes the imagination of Augusten to spout Nazi stereotypes.

Unexpected, though, was the striking insight into repressed emotions and the ability of a person to love another despite seemingly insurmountable flaws. Augusten's relationships perfectly capture what I think is a quintessentially urban tendency of people nowadays to tirelessly compensate for what they think they are missing in life. In a way, this novel shows how cheerless that condition is, and, at the same time, be unafraid of what is, after all, a price for being human.

Augusten's narration of what his childhood was, the blatant abandonment he experienced from his parents, the perversion done to him as a teenager, makes the reader in turns awed and morbidly fascinated with the man that he has become. There were times our protagonist was readily aware of his shortcomings--from keeping up with the AA meetings to juggling his relationships with Pighead and Foster--and if those weren't uncomfortable enough, the reader is also made cognizant of his glaring denials about how he was living his life, pre- and post-rehab.

I highly recommend this novel. Whether one is seeking an understanding of alcoholism, or simply in want of a refreshing, entertaining read--granted it's peeking into the "memoirs" of a self-confessed mess--this story will take you from laughs to sadness, hope to sorrow. (and back again). Without a doubt, this work proves that Burroughs is an Original.