With the publication of his third memoir in six years, Augusten Burroughs has had plenty of time and more than enough reason to contemplate the nature of perception.
Imagine, he suggests, that you are driving past what appears to be a terrible car accident; you see crushed metal, smashed glass. 'You feel sick. . . . You think, `I hope nobody dies.' '' Then, he says, pretend you're inside the car, and it's a safe, crash-resistant Volvo. 'You look at your arms and legs, and you're OK, and maybe you notice the radio is working, and everything looks kind of normal. So you think, `This was just a fender bender.' So which perspective is correct?''
Such thoughts recur frequently to the chatty, bestselling and, lately, somewhat beleaguered author, who has excavated shards of his troubling, colorful past to produce Running with Scissors (adolescence / bizarre living arrangements / unhealthy relationship at 13 with adult sexual predator) and Dry (young adulthood / high-paying job at NYC ad agency / crippling alcohol addiction) and now the sinister A Wolf at the Table (early childhood / abusive father / corrosive and constant fear).
Wolf (St. Martin's, $24.95) marks the first time Burroughs, who appears Monday at Miami Beach's Lincoln Theatre for Books & Books, has written in excruciating depth about his father, John Robison, who was chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and, Burroughs says, "a sociopath and an alcoholic."
In Wolf, he writes, ''This is my first clear memory of my father: I am in Mexico, I am five, and he is not safe to be around.'' Descriptions grow increasingly more disturbing (''[H]e snarled or barked -- an ugly noise that human people never make -- and the car roared forward, rear wheels fishtailing. . . . He was steering for the pole. . . . I leaped out of the car'') as Burroughs charts his father's rebuffs, anti-social behavior, neglect and mental and physical abuse.
The dark material in Wolf is not tempered by the wry, self-deprecating wit of Running with Scissors or Dry. It's narrated by a child-size Burroughs, who records impressions from when he was 1 ½ and says he remembers being 8 months old. ('I assumed everyone was like that. When people say, `How can you remember a conversation you had when you were 13?' I'm always flabbergasted. How can you not remember?'')
Burroughs says his dry sense of humor was developed as a teenager in response to ''being thrown into chaos'' as his parents divorced and his mother grew more manic, the reason it does not show up in Wolf. ''As a kid I was earnest and hopeful and loved my dad.'' Loved his mom, too, although they're now estranged; he hasn't spoken to her for eight years.
The book's stark tone may not easily engage readers, but one of Burroughs' strengths is his ability to stir empathy.
''What I respond to is how he survived,'' says novelist Brian Antoni, author of South Beach. ``I love that search for unconditional love, which we all have to go through. That's the overriding theme of his books. To me it's amazing, the emotions he takes you through, from sadness to happiness, from hilarity to pulling at your heart strings. I don't know how how he does that, but that's a sign of great writing.''
MEDIA SKEPTICISM
Media reaction to Wolf, however, has leaned toward cynicism, buoyed perhaps by a recent spate of memoirs revealed as fiction and a now-settled lawsuit over Running with Scissors brought by the family with which Burroughs lived as a teen (there was an undisclosed financial settlement, and St. Martin's agreed to label Scissors a ''book'' instead of a 'memoir''). A New York magazine writer remains skeptical of Burroughs' memory even when the author recites their conversations back to him verbatim. An Entertainment Weekly review spits that ''[e]ven if everything in this book went down exactly as Burroughs tells it, not a single page rings true.'' A New York Times reporter interviewed the author's brother, who confirms one confrontation involving a BB gun, and Burroughs' mother, who says she doesn't remember the incident.
The Times also spoke with university colleagues of Burroughs' father, who obligingly called Robison a good guy.
Burroughs says that in The Times story, his father's best friend admitted that Robison ''puzzled'' him, adding that ``I knew nothing about his home life.''
''Imagine not knowing anything about your best friend's home life for 45 years,'' Burroughs marvels. ``And what an interesting word: puzzle. My father had a perfectly constructed mask he showed the world, and he was successful in maintaining it. But the alcohol cracked the mask. . . . Our dynamic is he would do something terrible, and five minutes later he'd deny it or act in a completely different way.''
Novelist and memoirist Haven Kimmel says the media skepticism is unfounded.
''Augusten has been my best friend for eight years, and he's the most honest person I know,'' she says. ``That is one of the things that comes through in his writing. Critics seem to want to find a scandal where there isn't one in a way his readers do not. Readers see his authenticity and his great and abiding sense of humor. . . . People are going to be stunned at how anyone who lived through this childhood could nonetheless be so vibrant and joyful.''
Burroughs is frustrated but resigned to implications that parts of Wolf were invented. ''Memoir is not a court stenographer's report,'' he says. 'It's life and memory and the impressions of one person. . . . But that's how it is now, because of the fake memoirs. Memoir became popular, and opportunistic people thought, `I can make myself rich and famous,' and it sort of corrupted the genre. That's a shame. Memoir is important. . . . Memoirs connect you to humanity.
``When I compress events I tell readers. I've always had author's notes. Dry was my journal. It was 1,800 pages. I had to compress some of the people and things, but I didn't do it to make the book slicker. You just wouldn't get through it otherwise. I don't make things up. I wouldn't say I'd gone and fought in Iraq if I hadn't or say I was in a gang if I were a privileged white girl. . . . It's not to say I have every detail right. My mother may have had a different outfit on than I remember. . . . All I can do is say this: I continue to publish memoir when it's the worst possible time to do it.''
ROBISON'S DIARIES
Robison died in 2005, so his side of the story remains heard only through his diaries, which Burroughs inherited. He references only a couple of entries, including the chilling ``Augusten very distant tonight. Probably because of my games.''
''If you read the diaries from beginning to end, they correspond with the book,'' says Kimmel, who has seen the entries. ``He generally has documents that support all of his memoirs and personal essays, and he has the grace to not even use them.''
Burroughs expected to feel a ''profound, delayed grief'' at his father's death but instead ''what I felt was relief.'' Writing Wolf was cathartic but not a task he could contemplate earlier in his career.
``I couldn't write about my father even though he was the driving force in my life. He was my rocket fuel. He gave me ambition to connect with other people because I couldn't connect with him.''
Burroughs lives in Amherst now, scene of most of the traumatic events of Wolf (he also has an apartment in New York City). It's odd, he says, to move back to the scene of such a harrowing time, but he wanted to live near his brother and his 13-year-old nephew, and he missed the atmosphere.
''When you grow up in the country, it becomes part of you,'' he says. ``You feel you own these woods, that they belong to you. It hit me how much I missed the smell and the air. But it is awkward and uncomfortable. There's a memory every five feet. When I turn out of my driveway I see the University of Massachusetts. There's my father staring at me. But painful memories are in New York, too. . . . I was just not going to let my unhappy memories and the family I was raised with scare me away.''
