A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
by Augusten Burroughs
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Book Reviews of A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
Book Review: Bared Teeth
Summary: 5 Stars
I am a devoted Augusten Burroughs fan. Have been for years. I felt like I knew him. And then I read A Wolf at the Table and realized that I had no idea what this man was made of.
The descriptions of his childhood, rich with memory and detail, depict a horror that is more felt than witnessed in many instances. It's about what wasn't more often than what was. Dismissal. Being purposely overlooked and toyed with.
This memoir simply reinforces the amazement that he has grown into a well adjusted and successful man. I have no idea how. He had no template. He had nothing but hatred and crazy in his house.
I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. Even if you had the most loving household, and adoring parents, you can find a common ground. If only to think, that wasn't my childhood at all. Not even a little bit.
It left me feeling exposed. Squeezed empty of oxygen. Smothered. And spoiled rotten by my loving parents.
Book Review: Do you have to love your father?
Summary: 3 Stars
Hitler was somebody's father. Not actually true, but he could have been. Stalin was somebody's father, how's that? A Wolf at the Table explores Burroughs relationship with his father, continuing to flesh out the story from his earlier memoir. The story is brutally honest, or at least it seems so. A son who desperately wants his father's love and never truly understands that his father was never worthy of the effort. Do you have to love your father just because he's your father?
One suspects once again that Burroughs, who changed his name to sounded more "literary," is engaging in great liberties with the truth. So what? I never understood why he was so defensive about Running With Scissors (which, due to a lawsuit, had the word "memoir" stripped from it). The memoir form is supposed to represent the author's experience, not the letter of what happened.
Also I must note it's a terrible, heavy-handed title. Why not call it My Father Was Bad Man. The book exceeds the title.
Book Review: Hints at much worse than it tells
Summary: 5 Stars
I knew this would be Augusten's life without the laughs, the part he couldn't face till he'd written five or six other books. I was almost afraid to read it, and I was duly outraged at the things that happened in his family. But the real chills were what he didn't tell. What was the "something terrible" in his father's hand at the foot of Augusten's bed? Has he really forgotten about the years at the farmhouse? Was burying that body really a dream, or not? What were his father's "games"? I find such things far more terrifying than a ream of Stephen King's splatter-prose, and more lasting in a literary sense. Still, I recognized the same author who brought so much humor out of bad situations in "Dry," "Possible Side Effects," "Magical Thinking," "Running With Scissors" and even the completely fictitious "Sellevision," who doesn't hesitate to show his own flaws as boldly as those of anyone else in the books. And as always, he recognizes that behind every sad story, there's usually another sad story.Book Review: Suspenseful and Very Real
Summary: 5 Stars
As a huge fan of Augusten Burrough books, I looked forward to reading A Wolf at the Table. This book is quite different than his others, it is a serious and passionate memoir and his life with his father.
The first paragraph was enough to draw me into the book and Burrough's life. From the beginning, the tension is almost unbearable as facts about his father are slowly revealed.
The awfulness that was his father and the thoughts of the young Burroughs makes this book memorable and powerful.
I found this passage particularly poignant. When Burrough's was five years old, he went to Mexico with his mother. He meets a man and writes: "But he adored me and I knew it. This was a new, euphoric sensation. My first taste of a drug. I wanted more."
By the author of the award winning book, Harmonious Environment: Beautify, Detoxify and Energize Your Life, Your Home and Your Planet.
Book Review: Enjoyable Read But Might Be Another Story Between The Lines
Summary: 3 Stars
I enjoyed reading the memoir but also understand why it has been given an "unreliable narrator" tag by some readers. It's perplexing to me that while documenting his father's severe, painful, pervasive and bloody skin disease, Burroughs never addresses the possibility that that might be why his father didn't want him climbing on his lap or hugging him. I was similarly confused that there wasn't more reflection on his part as to why in God's name, after finally being rid of his father, he would then call him for food and invite him over. I know the father/son bond can be enormously strong regardless of how rotten the father is, but there's a clunkiness to this chronicle that suggests to me Burroughs needed to plumb his emotions and motivations a bit further. Similarly, speculating to some extent on the emotions and motivations of his family members might have given this memoir more resonance. Nonetheless, a gripping read.