A Wolf at the Table

by Augusten Burroughs

St. Martins Press

The latest memoir by Augusten Burroughs opens with his pre-adolescent self running through the woods in the middle of the night, being chased by his flashlight wielding father. “If my father caught me he would cut my neck,” he writes. “So I just kept going.” Later, Burroughs returns to the scene explaining that when the boy finally escapes, “Prey knows when it has escaped,” he writes.

Stripped of the wit of his memoirs “Running with Scissors,” and “Dry,” Burroughs presents the painful but never less than compulsively readable story of his relationship with his father, who served as a background figure in earlier books. Professor John G. Robison of Buckland, Massachusetts was a professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, and died three years ago.

After one fight between his parents, his mother takes him to stay in a motel for a week and on returning he finds his guinea pig has been neglected to death. “My childhood was over now,” he writes. “A part of me had died. But another part was born.” It’s a particularly affecting chapter, laying out the boy’s affection for his pet, his mother’s melodramatic responses, and his father’s indifference. That last theme informs every page of “A Wolf at the Table.” In another scene, young Augusten tries to warn his father that the family dog is sick, going so far as to say his father “ought” to take him to the vet. In response, he gets a long lecture on the meaning of the word, “ought.” That pet died as well.

It might appear unseemly for an author who has already pored through his life in four previous memoir-esque tomes to finally start attacking his father in print. So Burroughs places the man in context – describing his father’s violent upbringing in the south – but then the litany of crimes he introduces are too appalling to excuse.

These scenes begin innocuously – the father buys Augusten a baseball glove only to refuse to play catch – and quickly builds to several chilling moments, including after his parents divorce, receiving a call from his father saying, “I’m going to kill you.”

Burroughs has a tremendous skill at nimbly creating a scene of abject and inevitable misery out of tiny details: the family’s house in the Massachusetts countryside circa 1975; the father afflicted with psoriatic arthritis to the point that he bleeds through his shirts while sitting at the kitchen table grading papers; his mother wearing a caftan and typing poetry all day. Both parents chain-smoke, of course, and drink like fishes.

The one scene that comes close to familial affection is when Augusten’s elder brother (John Elder Robison, himself the author of a popular memoir) returns home briefly, “as a race car returns to the pit.” A fight ensues between the elder son and the father, and Augusten hands his brother his own gun urging him to kill. “I hadn’t known I wanted my father dead until that my moment,” he writes.

Years later, at the age of 17, Burroughs was living on his own in the depressed town of Holyoke and asked his father for food. He brings him some Wonder bread, bologna and fruit punch, offers a lecture and drives off in his Jaguar convertible. In response Burroughs declares, “I was going to make something of myself. Something big.”

On his deathbed, the father tells Augusten’s brother, “You’ve been a good boy, a good son.” Needless to say, he has no words at all for Augusten, and the author soothes himself with the memory of his father in his doorway at night, saying “Very much I love you.”

There are darker undercurrents in the book – could his father have been a serial killer? Could the author have been interfered with as a young boy? And could Augusten end up just like his father, terrorizing a family? The subject is serious enough to the author that he has traded in his droll humor for something less defensive, more affecting. The wit is still there but not so deflective.

One is hard pressed to believe every detail – the author’s credibility is hardly pristine after a recent, settled lawsuit concerning his first memoir – but the sum of its parts makes up a portrait that every angry teenager might wish to inflict upon their dead parent.