This is the second Burroughs book I've read, and again, I find his writing not necessarily beautiful and poetic, or quotable and elegant, but incredibly engaging and real, and he makes me smile at how honest he is -- when he tells us something awful and personal about himself, I'm taken aback and almost embarrassed at first, then a little more embarrassed because I realize I do it too or at least do something similar and equally kind of disgusting and embarrassing, and then smile at his ability to tell us this when I'd barely be able to write it down on a piece of paper that only I'd be reading. It's endearing.

I am also a big fan in particular of cheesy, lame-sounding, last-thing-in-the-world-you-want-to-do self-help type activities with groups of people (teambuilding and the like would fall into this too, icebreakers, etc) that end up, at the end of the day, having exactly the effect they're intended to, and win you over, however much you thought you weren't 'that type'. (Warning: only Georgetown applicable: ) What do you expect, I was an ESCAPE leader. Though I guess the point is that the beauty of this shit is when it appeals to people that wouldn't dream of going on escape, let alone apply to be marshmallow roasters.

3.5 stars - It was really good.

Great insight into the mind of an addict and the writing has me wanting to pick up his other memoirs; really enjoy his narrative style. Not recommended however for those with delicate sensibilities.

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Favorite Quote: When you have your health, you have everything.

First Sentence: Sometimes when you work in advertising, you'll get a product that is really garbage, and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life.

I've read much of Burroughs' memoirs, so not sure why I have not added them here. Like much of the world, I read Running With Scissors (but I will make a point to claim to have read it well before the movie came out).

“Dry" is a memoir about addiction, and if you have read as many addiction memoirs as I have you can see certain similarities. The characters one meets, for example, are wacky yet universal. One can always learn so much from the unlikeliest people. And there is always the most obvious things to learn about oneself.

The saddest most disturbing thing in "Dry" was the author living in squalor while in a bender. Why was that so sad and disturbing, you want to know? Because he did it for so long, and for so well, and kept doing it, and then makes us all wallow in it and re-live the squalor and the sadness through the telling. And that squalor is squalid.

**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.

Wonderful book. Wonderful writer.

3.5 ⭐️

I loved this book! A family member recommended it to me and I thanked her for doing so. This is the story of Augusten Borroughs's journey to overcome his addiction to alcohol. He is an advertising copywriter and it's clear he knows how to tell a compelling story. I loved the nuances and descriptors in his stories. I'd recommend it even if one is not going through recovery.

This is a difficult, but worthwhile read. I admired the author's ability to share so openly about his addiction. Most of the time I didn't like him, yet I couldn't put the book down.

By far Augusten Burroughs best book, enough said. If you don't like Dry, you don't like AB.

Snot yourself with hysterics kind of laughter.

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.

This was a second read, but a difficult one. Burroughs is horribly frank, exposing the raw, vile, agonising nature of addiction in a way that made me very uncomfortable and at times very depressed. His writing is brilliant, he can be funny about the most appalling things, and most importantly, his spirit, his ability to take a long hard and honest (as far as I can tell) look at himself in the mirror, makes this in some ways a hopeful book. And yes, a very compelling read. But not for the fainthearted. I am, however, looking for instalment three of his biography.