A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father

"As a little boy, I had a dream that my father had taken me to the woods where there was a dead body. He buried it and told me I must never tell. It was the only thing we'd ever done together as father and son, and I promised not to tell. But unlike most dreams, the memory of this one never left me. And sometimes...I wasn't altogether sure about one thing: was it just a dream?"

When Augusten Burroughs was small, his father was a shadowy presence in his life: a form on the stairs, a cough from the basement, a silent figure smoking a cigarette in the dark. As Augusten grew older, something sinister within his father began to unfurl. Something dark and secretive that could not be named.

Betrayal after shocking betrayal ensued, and Augusten's childhood was over. The kind of father he wanted didn't exist for him. This father was distant, aloof, uninterested...

And then the "games" began.

With A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs makes a quantum leap into untapped emotional terrain: the radical pendulum swing between love and hate, the unspeakably terrifying relationship between father and son. Told with scorching honesty and penetrating insight, it is a story for anyone who has ever longed for unconditional love from a parent. Though harrowing and brutal, A Wolf at the Table will ultimately leave you buoyed with the profound joy of simply being alive. It's a memoir of stunning psychological cruelty and the redemptive power of hope.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Augusten Burroughs' much-anticipated new memoir begins with a chase. In a gripping prologue, we are alongside the pajama-clad 10-year-old as he races barefoot through the woods near his family's Massachusetts home, his enraged, alcoholic monster of a father at his heels. The lumbering father's flashlight beam cuts through the dark as young Augusten flees with the awkward desperation of a wounded deer... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) and, blessedly, gets away. Burroughs writes, 'I sensed that the hunt was over. Prey knows when it has escaped.' This scene, shocking and terrifyingly thrilling, hooks the reader immediately. It promises that Burroughs is about to take us on another rapid-fire, acerbic, so-horrible-it's-hilarious ride of our lives, the kind we've taken with him in both 'Running With Scissors' and 'Dry.' Yet this is not that Burroughs.

Focusing for the most part on his childhood up to age 12, 'A Wolf at the Table' is, technically, a prequel. The author's father, mostly absent from 'Running With Scissors,' is front-and-center here, and Burroughs paints him in grim detail. A violent drinker afflicted with rotten teeth, psoriasis and a bitter resentment toward his wife, the elder Burroughs is at best a neglectful father and, at worst, a fountain of emotional and physical abuse.

Burroughs achingly describes the unrequited love he held for his father. Six-year-old Augusten goes to pathetic extremes to extract normal love — at one point creating a construction-paper dog costume to greet his father in after seeing him lovingly stroke the family's golden retriever. Heartbreakingly, the child resorts to creating a secret scarecrow version of his dad and sleeps with it to simulate the affection he hungered for.

Early on, his mother moves herself and Augusten away from his dangerous father, only to move back in when Dad has calmed down. But he never stays calm for long, and the boy suffers a series of rejections, humiliations and atrocities at his father's hands, culminating in the gruesome deaths by neglect of both his dog and beloved pet guinea pig. Now fueled by hatred, the young Burroughs prays for his father's death, fantasizes about murdering him and, in one riveting scene, puts a rifle in his older brother's hands and urges him to 'kill him, kill him, kill him.'

Burroughs is doing something new here: ripping the scabs off emotional wounds without his usual acidic humor to deaden the pain. 'A Wolf at the Table' is all pain, all the time. Yet there is an odd restraint to his writing, a stillness that keeps the reader at arm's length. This detached quality seems intentional, but it only serves to deaden the emotional impact and tamp down the immediacy of what is certainly a gripping tale.

Still, Burroughs retains his capacity to move the reader: There is gorgeous writing on every page. Describing how his birth coincided with the decline of his parents' marriage, he writes, 'I was born into their smoking, oily wreckage.' When his mother returns, thin and defeated, from a stay in a mental hospital, he describes her 'cemetery mood' and writes, 'I could so easily imagine a nurse's aid(e) seeing a dark, tangled mass on the floor and sweeping it into a dustbin, not realizing it was my mother's spirit.'

Clearly, this was not an easy tale to tell. 'A Wolf at the Table' forces us to recognize the immense harm done to children who are menaced, abused — or worse, ignored — by their parents. They become haunted adults, wondering what they could have done to make themselves more lovable. The years go by, but they remain one baby step ahead of the beast from their past — even if he's only a ghost now.

Burroughs is to be commended for addressing this painful material head-on and with such sobriety, but I can't help missing his crisp, biting humor and the immediacy of an author who typically puts his reader right alongside him for the journey. As much as I admire his brave effort, I felt relegated to the back seat. With Augusten Burroughs, I want to be riding shotgun."

Reviewed by Monica Holloway, author of 'Driving With Dead People' and the forthcoming memoir 'Cowboy and Wills: A Love Story', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"A deeply felt personal essay padded to book length." Kirkus Reviews

The author of Running with Scissors delves into new territory with his most personal and unexpected memoir yet. A Wolf at the Table is the story of Burroughs' relationship with his father, his stunning psychological cruelty, and the redemptive power of hope.