"It was brutal to write," says Augusten Burroughs of A Wolf at the Table, a new memoir about his father. "I hadn’t really planned to write about my father. It was sort of like water under the bridge — that’s gone and I’m never gonna have to think about that again. But then when he died in 2005 I didn’t feel the way I expected. I thought I would feel this wave of grief or sadness or longing or just regret over what we didn’t have. But instead I felt free for the first time."
Burroughs shot to fame in 2003 with his first memoir, Running with Scissors, which recounts his bizarre adolescence spent living with his mother’s psychiatrist and his eccentric family — a story so strange and unusual that Burroughs has been accused more than once of fabricating it entirely (these claims have not so far held up in court).
His second memoir, Dry, dealt (perhaps not surprisingly, given the content of the first) with his recovery from alcoholism years later in New York. Now, in A Wolf at the Table, Burroughs has returned to his childhood in Massachusetts where he explores his troubled relationship with his alcoholic and, he claims, sociopathic father.
Wolf is a chilling memoir that is markedly different in tone from his other books, which are full of black comedy even in their bleakest moments. But humour would be out of place in this latest installment in Burroughs’ richly unusual life, which is told from a young child’s uncomprehending point of view. The young Burroughs starts out craving his father’s attention, but gradually grows terrified of the shadowy and dangerous presence that stalks his house at night, starves his guinea pig and turns his docile pet dog into a ferocious beast while Burroughs and his mother are away from the house for just a few nights.
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