'Wolf' bares its teeth

Burroughs chronicles heartbreaking relationship with his abusive father

By Vince Darcangelo, Special to the Rocky

Published April 24, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Photo by The Rocky / 2004

Augusten Burroughs

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With his chart-topping memoir Running with Scissors - a tale of growing up in the most dysfunctional of families - New York Times best-selling author Augusten Burroughs made us laugh. With his new book, A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father, Burroughs breaks our hearts.

Big time.

And in such a way that readers will be left clutching after the wickedly funny anecdotes peppered throughout the book as if they were long overdue gasps of air.

Burroughs recounts a childhood spent both fearing and adoring his alternately distant and abusive father, John Robison. "My father was a careful construction," he writes. "A studied husk. That's why when he smiled, it was wrong. The smile simply unzipped his face to reveal the darkness behind it."

Small, furry animals were harmed in the events that went into the making of this book (such as the time his father starved his hamster Ernie to death), as was the psyche of a young Burroughs, who alongside his mother spent more than a few nights in safehouses to be protected from the violent temper of the drunken patriarch.

In Robison, Burroughs depicts a disgruntled professor with a troubled past whose mental illness becomes more and more apparent as the book progresses.In the early pages, while his mother and father are briefly separated, his father is a ghost, a myth, an abstraction - a figure his mother describes as "dangerous."

"I held the word in my mouth before letting it out. 'Dangerous.' What was this unspeakable danger, which had the quality of a dream evaporating just after waking? A name, but no shape. What was it about him that made me wary even when he wasn't drunk? And whatever it was, did I have it within me, too?"

A Wolf at the Table acts as a sort of prequel to Running With Scissors, covering Burroughs' childhood before he was sent to live with his mother's therapist, as well as ensuing years. It's a powerful read, quick-paced and written with a matter-of-factness indicative of the age of its narrator at the time of the events but with the added wisdom of three decades of reflection. It delivers an overload of varying emotions, most of them inducing queasiness.

And while it contains the expected varieties of heartbreak (the soul-crushing accounts of Burroughs' continued attempts to win his father's affection, such as constructing and wearing a dog costume because his father paid more attention to the family dog), it also goes to some unexpected places.

Like Poe's House of Usher, the House of Robison falls into disrepair - literally and emotionally. Starting with the deck, the house starts to crumble as the strained relationships between its inhabitants begin to unravel.

So does his father's sanity. Left alone with his father (his mother was hospitalized following a nervous breakdown), Burroughs hides in his room, horrified, as Robison sharpens knives at the kitchen table, speaking in tongues and sporting mysterious bloodstains on his clothes. Burroughs wakes to find his father in his room, standing over him and watching him sleep.

"I was born into their smoking, oily wreckage. Married almost ten years by then, my mother was suicidal and my father, suffering with psoriatic arthritis, was consumed by alcoholism. . . . He wondered if he should just shoot himself in the head. He must have wondered, too, if he should take his family with him."

When his mother returns, the situation fails to improve. His mother retreats to her own room, the family divided. "It almost felt like the house contained three caves, and each of us sat in the back of our own.

"Sometimes I could hear my mother howl from inside hers. Over the sound of her endless typing, I could hear her forlorn, desperate wail. Like a wounded animal, crouched in the corner, knowing it would soon run out of life.

"When my father came near my cave, I could hear him breathing and grinding his teeth.

"People believe in God because they can't face being alone. It didn't scare me to think of being alone in the world. It scared me that I wasn't."

To put the tragedy of Burroughs' childhood in perspective, the only male authority figure who shows him any affection is a pedophilic construction worker who mistakes a long-haired Augusten for a little girl.

Burroughs lightens the load, however, with a helping of humorous anecdotes and an economical writing style that gives just enough detail to express the book's gut-twisting emotions without tripping over its own language. The scenes play out like the silent images of a home movie, so that you can almost hear the machine-gun rattle of the spinning reels in the background.

What gives the book its greater meaning, though, is Burroughs' willingness to take a longitudinal view of his father. Unlike many memoirs that entertain but fail to convey a message beyond the literal, Burroughs' takes us out of the house and into adulthood, describing moments from his relationship with his father, which could be described as strained at best.

By doing so, he reminds us that our childhoods are always with us, like it or not. Leaving his father's home didn't make everything better. The dysfunction of the House of Robison is something Burroughs will always have to deal with, even after the publishing of this book.

Whether that thought is tragic or comforting, A Wolf at the Table skillfully reminds us that the past never goes away.

It's in our blood.

Utne Reader, 5280

Vince Darcangelo is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in and numerous other publications. He lives in Boulder.

Memoir madness

In the wake of the James Frey scandal, Burroughs' last book, Possible Side Effects, a collection of true stories, came with a long disclaimer noting that many of the situations and characters may have been altered from real events. His newest comes only with this brief note: "Some names have been changed."

A Wolf at the Table

* By Augusten Burroughs. St. Martin's Press, 256 pages, $24.95.

* Grade: A

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