I feel like I've been wading around in the muck with my reading the past few weeks. I've read all the news reports I can about Katrina -- very depressing. I've also been slogging through parts of Disneywar (previous posts here and here) and the novel "Couples" by John Updike. (I'll post more about Updike soon.)
Then last night, most fortuitously, I received in the mail from my friend Lanore W. a copy of Dry, a memoir, by Augusten Burroughs. I've read about half of it -- it's about his attempt to recover from alcoholism. This book, like his first memoir, Running with Scissors, is so compulsively readable I have a hard time putting it down. It's dark, but funny. His subject matter, in both books, is his own troubled life. He writes about child abuse, alcoholism, and depressingly anonymous sexual encounters. Yet I'm of the opinion that his writing is suffused with an underlying moral clarity that affirms the value and uniqueness of every living person.
Having given this ringing endorsement of Burroughs, I have to add that he is not for everyone. Many will find his writing grotesque and disturbing -- but not me! I expect to finish Dry in the next day or two.
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Oh boy, she's right, it's hard to put this one down. I read 'Dry' in 2 days, moving everything else in my life aside in the meantime. It's just amazing how Burroughs will tell you the most intimate, scary, horrible details not only of his life but of his thought processes. Just like David Sedaris, he makes you feel like a human being because you realize that we all have horrible thoughts, but they are balanced by good thoughts and actions. I encourage anyone to read this book, and my thanks to Angie for giving me 'Running with Scissors' before. I got my sister totally hooked on Burroughs, and she's even recommending it to friends in the small conservative Texas town she lives in - with caveats, of course.
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