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Otherwise known as my reviews of Dry by Augusten Burroughs*, Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs* and When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris.
Dry by Augusten Burroughs
Addiction: Alcohol
I really loved this book -- no surprise there, since I also enjoyed Running with Scissors and Magical Thinking. If your only exposure to Augusten Burroughs was the rather-tepid movie, know 1.) GO READ THE BOOK and 2.) Dry is essentially the sequel, but not one that you need to read the original to understand (on his Web site he said the book existed as diary entries before RwS) about how he kicks his addiction to alcohol.
One of my biggest issues with stories about people who took drugs is that sometimes they get caught up in the minutiae of how they took the drugs, which is usually boring. (Like the drug sections in Anthony Bourdain. Yeah, yeah, you snorted coke down the length of the restaurant bar ... can you get back to talking about food again? Some of David Sedaris' early entries are kind of like this, too.) Burroughs avoids this by showing only one night of drunken debauchery with his undertaker friend (Is that character in Dry a composite, by the way? An undertaker boyfriend shows up in Magical Thinking but he doesn't seem to share the same traits with this guy.), and then launching into the rehab process in the second chapter.
Here's an embarrassing thing I didn't know before I read this book: I didn't know Alcohol Anonymous meetings are intended to be a lifetime commitment. (It makes you want to not drink just to not have to deal with that responsibility. ACK! PEOPLE!) A lot of media makes it seem like alcoholism is something you can get over in a relatively short period of time and ... yeah, not true.
What I like about the book is that it takes a viewpoint of a subculture that is first alienated by it but slowly becomes a part of it. When Augusten first gets to rehab (a center for homosexuals only which isn't as sexy as he hopes), he goes because his job forces him to do so. He's disgusted by the surroundings and the people there. When the group introduces themselves to him by attacking him with stuffed animals he wonders if he's in the right place. Then another member of the group, a doctor who used to have it together before he started swiping his patients' pills, tells him, "It's corny, but this really does work." Near the end of his rehab, Augusten, who started out cynical, says that to a newcomer.
But, the road to sobriety isn't easy and while Augusten mostly manages to stay on track, two of the men in his life: his ex-lover Pighead (an affectionate nickname -- Pighead calls Augusten "Fuckhead") and his lover-he's-not-supposed-to-have Foster, combined with his frustrating job in advertising, don't make it so easy. Both of their stories are sad in a way that makes you feel both angry and sorry for Augusten as he goes through his upward climb and downward spiral.
I liked a lot of the characters/people we met in this book, to the point where I'm kind of bummed none of them will show up in future memoirs. Well, Pighead can't (I don't feel like that's a spoiler given its the 1990s and when we first meet him we hear he has AIDS), but I'm going to miss Hayden, the drug-addict Brit who becomes Augusten's platonic roommate, and Greer, Augusten's semi-bitchy partner at the advertising firm.
Some people seem to have been sucked in by James Frey's damage control. (Did you know HE WAS THE FIRST ONE TO COMBINE FICTION WITH BIOGRAPHY?) But I still think he's a choad, a choad who, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_red_shoes says, makes himself look a LOT better than he should in his rehab experience. Dry is like the anti-A Million Little Pieces. Where Frey is posturing, Burroughs is humble, and its his slow realization of that humility that makes Dry great.
He's also much humbler then the next book I read.
Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Addiction: Sex
OK, this book only barely counts. It's not by and about a gay guy with an addiction, but by a gay guy about straight people addicted to sex. But it kind of fits with the unintentional theme I had going, so I'll press on.
I toldsummersdaughter recently that I used to like Palahniuk, but he's making me sick lately and I'm overall pretty disillusioned by the guy. I kind of wish I could just step over the line and say I outright hate him (the strong strain of misty-eyed manly-men-rock-and-should-have-full-rein-to-run-over-women strain in his journalism would be enough) yet I can't say I exactly hate his novels. He has some interesting ideas and Invisible Monsters was fun. Choke ... eh. I liked some things about it. I liked Denny the sidekick character, who spits out messages of doom while he's kept in the stocks at his job as a historical interpreter, and later replaces sex addiction with a rock collection. I liked the rape fantasy scene, until the end when it got a little sexist. I liked how main character Victor started taking responsibility for every accusation the old women at his mother's nursing home made him. I liked how Victor's mom used to make her living recording videos of her leading men through guided meditation where they would end up having sex with female historical figures.
But here's the thing: if you read Fight Club or have seen the movie, there is no reason for you to read Choke unless Chuck Palahniuk is the only author you read. Yes, I know that statement is going to make some members of The Cult sputter, but it basically follows the same structure: isolated guy judgmental of the world around him encounters slow weirdness in his life that builds up to a big barrage of weirdness. There is a moment where things seem to go right followed by an UNEXPECTED TWIST followed by a MOMENT OF CATHARSIS and blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, I've also read Lullaby and both that book and Choke have first-person narrative voices that are so similar to the guy's in Fight Club that I always hear Edward Norton's voice when I read anything by Palahniuk. (OK, it changed a little bit in Invisible Monsters, but I'm not sure if he just hadn't solidified the Norton voice - it was written first even if it was published later - or the main character is female and I just projected it was different.)
Also, is it just me, or does the climax to this book make NO FUCKING SENSE. [SPOILERS] It's not so much that Paige Marshall was a patient-pretending-to-be-a-doctor that bothered me (and it made some of the wackier sequences, like the "my-abortion-will-give-your-mom-her-brain-back" and the seduction scene, make more sense ... kind of). But how the fuck did Victor Mancini manage to make repeated visits to his mother in a "nursing home" and 1.) never talk to a real doctor on staff and 2.) not realize the place was a mental institution and not a nursing home. Was he so selectively blind or did Paige happen to be the only patient younger than 50 there?
Blech, whatever. He probably meant to do that and to complain would miss the point and fuck this noise.
I feel like I want to move on from this guy, for serious. Especially since I think the two authors I read as bookends proved how ineffective he can be. Palahniuk's descriptions of the people at the sex addiction meetings ("They look like normal people ... they're your next door neighbor" -- I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think I'm too far off), pale in comparison to Augusten's stories of Pregnant Paul, the polite Ignatius J. Reilly and the woman in the paisley dress.
Also, I thought I was going to read Haunted just to prove I can get through the "Guts" story. I even went back and looked up the plot summary. Made 70 people faint? Bah. Looking at the plot summary the only thing that really grosses me out is the candle up the urethra, and that's more because of the stretching involved. Overall, though, William Burroughs has got that beat so hard you wouldn't even believe ... (NSFW - audio)
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Addiction: Heroin, Cocaine, Barbiturates, Yage, Black Meat, etc. etc. etc.
I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept of shock sites. I'm sure you've all experienced at least one of them and felt the consternation that comes with having your face contort into bizarre forms and your brain get temporarily tasered. Well, reading Naked Lunch is a lot like going to a shock site, like, a lot. I won't say every page has some kind of disgusting act involving blood, piss, shit and insect imagery, but ... a lot of them do.
This book was the subject of one of America's last obscenity trials, and it's easy to see why. It's both disgusting and unapproachable. It's probably one of the most difficult books I've ever read. Any structure in the book seems to be an accident. To find the patterns means the book forces you to look deeply even as its horrors push you away. If you're not sitting down with the notion of getting an idea, you will just be disgusted.
The book claims to have some sort of plot about a guy lost in Tangiers, but even that gives it more credit for a structure. It's basically just a horror show with recurring motifs. The decadent, abusive, upper-crust of society turned into the abusive, insect-like Mugwumps. The cold, scientific evil of Dr. Benway. The odd affects of the highs and lows of drugs. The mob-like mentality of people.
Those images stay with you, but so does something else: a feeling of sadness and desperation underneath. In my favorite sequence, a trio of actors are shown on a film. They fuck each other. The girl has vagina dentata. They fuck one of the boys and hang him. A number of horrible other things happen, but the movie ends. The actors come out into the theater, looking sad and tired. It's like The Aristocrats joke, except the punchline is a tragedy.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
Addiction: Cigarettes
Screw his position on the blogAttack the Strawliberal, er, "Stuff White People Like," I'm a huge fan of David Sedaris. But ... because I'm such a huge fan, this book is a little sad.
Looking back on his career, I see his books now as overlapping but generally following certain patterns in his life. Naked can be looked at as his early life. Me Talk Pretty One Day contains part of his early life but also his move into his general pattern of living. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim was about, well, his family. When You Are Engulfed in Flames is about his middle age.
Or, more specifically, I feel like my "friend" is getting old and it makes me sad.
I don't totally know what to make of this book. On the one hand, it's more reflective, and has an understanding and even a sad nostalgia that the earlier books haven't developed. On the other, there's also a sort of disconnectedness from the book. Sedaris is a celebrity now, and as his material from his early life dries up, he's going to continue to have his odd sort of celebrity life. My Dad, who reminds me a lot of David because Dad is also the eldest (gay) son in a family of many children, said he felt conflicted about identifying with a guy who temporarily moves to Japan to quit smoking.
But then again, that last essay - which is huge - is the best part of the book. It has a lot of what made his early France essays great: the introduction to a new culture and his floundering in it, the new customs, etc. So maybe mocking Engrish has been done -- I haven't heard Sedaris do it yet. Also, Super-san makes me laugh far more than it should.
It's also amazing for the basic fact that it exists. I have to admit I NEVER, EVER, EVER thought David Sedaris would quit smoking. I started reading Sedaris when I was in the 8th grade. (I remember one month I forgot to do a book report and quickly banged out a review of Naked to hand in the next day because it was the only book I read that month. I was so scared that the teacher would chastise me for reviewing a book about a homosexual with lots of sexual situations and curse words and it WAS CALLED NAKED OH NOES but I ended up getting a 90 - which would have been 100 if it hadn't been a day late.) And I remember him shocking me because it was the first time I'd ever seen anybody in my Just-Say-No saturated world be unapologetic about smoking. (The part in the essay when he talks about educators asking to cut out references to his mother smoking in his essays for student reprints doesn't surprise me.)
But ... yeah, here's a huge essay about Sedaris giving it up, and it's a great piece of work. It has the best laughs, and goes over a big span of his life, from his early years to the daily attempts to quit to what he's been doing since then. The essay has a lot of laughs, but also the most moving piece of work ever: his visit to Hiroshima. That part of the book affected me so much I put it down and put my head in my arms for about five minutes, just so overcome with horror the world we live in. I had to remind myself that really horrible things happen in war on all sides before I could continue.
I don't know if Sedaris is going to have a huge staying power. I'm guessing if he is going to last into the 22nd Century, he may be someone like Robert Benchley or Dorothy Parker, enjoyed by a dedicated group of people determined to search for him but forgotten by everyone else. I guess when they go back and read his books, When You Are Engulfed in Flames will be as a bump in the road. A turn into his future, whatever that may be.
I await with a sort of reluctant anticipation. I want to see what happens next, with a new selfish wish for him to stay as long as possible. Well, now that he's stopped smoking it should help.
* No relation between these two, by the way. Augusten changed his name from Chris Robison some time ago -- he didn't name himself after William, either. You probably already knew that, but my brother asked and I wondered if someone else might, too.
(Posts TBD soon: Touch Me, I'm Sick review; Shakespeare's Sonnets review; the beginnings of The Pickwick Papers: Abridged)
Dry by Augusten Burroughs
Addiction: Alcohol
I really loved this book -- no surprise there, since I also enjoyed Running with Scissors and Magical Thinking. If your only exposure to Augusten Burroughs was the rather-tepid movie, know 1.) GO READ THE BOOK and 2.) Dry is essentially the sequel, but not one that you need to read the original to understand (on his Web site he said the book existed as diary entries before RwS) about how he kicks his addiction to alcohol.
One of my biggest issues with stories about people who took drugs is that sometimes they get caught up in the minutiae of how they took the drugs, which is usually boring. (Like the drug sections in Anthony Bourdain. Yeah, yeah, you snorted coke down the length of the restaurant bar ... can you get back to talking about food again? Some of David Sedaris' early entries are kind of like this, too.) Burroughs avoids this by showing only one night of drunken debauchery with his undertaker friend (Is that character in Dry a composite, by the way? An undertaker boyfriend shows up in Magical Thinking but he doesn't seem to share the same traits with this guy.), and then launching into the rehab process in the second chapter.
Here's an embarrassing thing I didn't know before I read this book: I didn't know Alcohol Anonymous meetings are intended to be a lifetime commitment. (It makes you want to not drink just to not have to deal with that responsibility. ACK! PEOPLE!) A lot of media makes it seem like alcoholism is something you can get over in a relatively short period of time and ... yeah, not true.
What I like about the book is that it takes a viewpoint of a subculture that is first alienated by it but slowly becomes a part of it. When Augusten first gets to rehab (a center for homosexuals only which isn't as sexy as he hopes), he goes because his job forces him to do so. He's disgusted by the surroundings and the people there. When the group introduces themselves to him by attacking him with stuffed animals he wonders if he's in the right place. Then another member of the group, a doctor who used to have it together before he started swiping his patients' pills, tells him, "It's corny, but this really does work." Near the end of his rehab, Augusten, who started out cynical, says that to a newcomer.
But, the road to sobriety isn't easy and while Augusten mostly manages to stay on track, two of the men in his life: his ex-lover Pighead (an affectionate nickname -- Pighead calls Augusten "Fuckhead") and his lover-he's-not-supposed-to-have Foster, combined with his frustrating job in advertising, don't make it so easy. Both of their stories are sad in a way that makes you feel both angry and sorry for Augusten as he goes through his upward climb and downward spiral.
I liked a lot of the characters/people we met in this book, to the point where I'm kind of bummed none of them will show up in future memoirs. Well, Pighead can't (I don't feel like that's a spoiler given its the 1990s and when we first meet him we hear he has AIDS), but I'm going to miss Hayden, the drug-addict Brit who becomes Augusten's platonic roommate, and Greer, Augusten's semi-bitchy partner at the advertising firm.
Some people seem to have been sucked in by James Frey's damage control. (Did you know HE WAS THE FIRST ONE TO COMBINE FICTION WITH BIOGRAPHY?) But I still think he's a choad, a choad who, as
the_red_shoes says, makes himself look a LOT better than he should in his rehab experience. Dry is like the anti-A Million Little Pieces. Where Frey is posturing, Burroughs is humble, and its his slow realization of that humility that makes Dry great.He's also much humbler then the next book I read.
Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Addiction: Sex
OK, this book only barely counts. It's not by and about a gay guy with an addiction, but by a gay guy about straight people addicted to sex. But it kind of fits with the unintentional theme I had going, so I'll press on.
I told
summersdaughter recently that I used to like Palahniuk, but he's making me sick lately and I'm overall pretty disillusioned by the guy. I kind of wish I could just step over the line and say I outright hate him (the strong strain of misty-eyed manly-men-rock-and-should-have-full-rein-to-run-over-women strain in his journalism would be enough) yet I can't say I exactly hate his novels. He has some interesting ideas and Invisible Monsters was fun. Choke ... eh. I liked some things about it. I liked Denny the sidekick character, who spits out messages of doom while he's kept in the stocks at his job as a historical interpreter, and later replaces sex addiction with a rock collection. I liked the rape fantasy scene, until the end when it got a little sexist. I liked how main character Victor started taking responsibility for every accusation the old women at his mother's nursing home made him. I liked how Victor's mom used to make her living recording videos of her leading men through guided meditation where they would end up having sex with female historical figures. But here's the thing: if you read Fight Club or have seen the movie, there is no reason for you to read Choke unless Chuck Palahniuk is the only author you read. Yes, I know that statement is going to make some members of The Cult sputter, but it basically follows the same structure: isolated guy judgmental of the world around him encounters slow weirdness in his life that builds up to a big barrage of weirdness. There is a moment where things seem to go right followed by an UNEXPECTED TWIST followed by a MOMENT OF CATHARSIS and blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, I've also read Lullaby and both that book and Choke have first-person narrative voices that are so similar to the guy's in Fight Club that I always hear Edward Norton's voice when I read anything by Palahniuk. (OK, it changed a little bit in Invisible Monsters, but I'm not sure if he just hadn't solidified the Norton voice - it was written first even if it was published later - or the main character is female and I just projected it was different.)
Also, is it just me, or does the climax to this book make NO FUCKING SENSE. [SPOILERS] It's not so much that Paige Marshall was a patient-pretending-to-be-a-doctor that bothered me (and it made some of the wackier sequences, like the "my-abortion-will-give-your-mom-her-brain-back" and the seduction scene, make more sense ... kind of). But how the fuck did Victor Mancini manage to make repeated visits to his mother in a "nursing home" and 1.) never talk to a real doctor on staff and 2.) not realize the place was a mental institution and not a nursing home. Was he so selectively blind or did Paige happen to be the only patient younger than 50 there?
Blech, whatever. He probably meant to do that and to complain would miss the point and fuck this noise.
I feel like I want to move on from this guy, for serious. Especially since I think the two authors I read as bookends proved how ineffective he can be. Palahniuk's descriptions of the people at the sex addiction meetings ("They look like normal people ... they're your next door neighbor" -- I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think I'm too far off), pale in comparison to Augusten's stories of Pregnant Paul, the polite Ignatius J. Reilly and the woman in the paisley dress.
Also, I thought I was going to read Haunted just to prove I can get through the "Guts" story. I even went back and looked up the plot summary. Made 70 people faint? Bah. Looking at the plot summary the only thing that really grosses me out is the candle up the urethra, and that's more because of the stretching involved. Overall, though, William Burroughs has got that beat so hard you wouldn't even believe ... (NSFW - audio)
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Addiction: Heroin, Cocaine, Barbiturates, Yage, Black Meat, etc. etc. etc.
I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept of shock sites. I'm sure you've all experienced at least one of them and felt the consternation that comes with having your face contort into bizarre forms and your brain get temporarily tasered. Well, reading Naked Lunch is a lot like going to a shock site, like, a lot. I won't say every page has some kind of disgusting act involving blood, piss, shit and insect imagery, but ... a lot of them do.
This book was the subject of one of America's last obscenity trials, and it's easy to see why. It's both disgusting and unapproachable. It's probably one of the most difficult books I've ever read. Any structure in the book seems to be an accident. To find the patterns means the book forces you to look deeply even as its horrors push you away. If you're not sitting down with the notion of getting an idea, you will just be disgusted.
The book claims to have some sort of plot about a guy lost in Tangiers, but even that gives it more credit for a structure. It's basically just a horror show with recurring motifs. The decadent, abusive, upper-crust of society turned into the abusive, insect-like Mugwumps. The cold, scientific evil of Dr. Benway. The odd affects of the highs and lows of drugs. The mob-like mentality of people.
Those images stay with you, but so does something else: a feeling of sadness and desperation underneath. In my favorite sequence, a trio of actors are shown on a film. They fuck each other. The girl has vagina dentata. They fuck one of the boys and hang him. A number of horrible other things happen, but the movie ends. The actors come out into the theater, looking sad and tired. It's like The Aristocrats joke, except the punchline is a tragedy.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
Addiction: Cigarettes
Screw his position on the blog
Looking back on his career, I see his books now as overlapping but generally following certain patterns in his life. Naked can be looked at as his early life. Me Talk Pretty One Day contains part of his early life but also his move into his general pattern of living. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim was about, well, his family. When You Are Engulfed in Flames is about his middle age.
Or, more specifically, I feel like my "friend" is getting old and it makes me sad.
I don't totally know what to make of this book. On the one hand, it's more reflective, and has an understanding and even a sad nostalgia that the earlier books haven't developed. On the other, there's also a sort of disconnectedness from the book. Sedaris is a celebrity now, and as his material from his early life dries up, he's going to continue to have his odd sort of celebrity life. My Dad, who reminds me a lot of David because Dad is also the eldest (gay) son in a family of many children, said he felt conflicted about identifying with a guy who temporarily moves to Japan to quit smoking.
But then again, that last essay - which is huge - is the best part of the book. It has a lot of what made his early France essays great: the introduction to a new culture and his floundering in it, the new customs, etc. So maybe mocking Engrish has been done -- I haven't heard Sedaris do it yet. Also, Super-san makes me laugh far more than it should.
It's also amazing for the basic fact that it exists. I have to admit I NEVER, EVER, EVER thought David Sedaris would quit smoking. I started reading Sedaris when I was in the 8th grade. (I remember one month I forgot to do a book report and quickly banged out a review of Naked to hand in the next day because it was the only book I read that month. I was so scared that the teacher would chastise me for reviewing a book about a homosexual with lots of sexual situations and curse words and it WAS CALLED NAKED OH NOES but I ended up getting a 90 - which would have been 100 if it hadn't been a day late.) And I remember him shocking me because it was the first time I'd ever seen anybody in my Just-Say-No saturated world be unapologetic about smoking. (The part in the essay when he talks about educators asking to cut out references to his mother smoking in his essays for student reprints doesn't surprise me.)
But ... yeah, here's a huge essay about Sedaris giving it up, and it's a great piece of work. It has the best laughs, and goes over a big span of his life, from his early years to the daily attempts to quit to what he's been doing since then. The essay has a lot of laughs, but also the most moving piece of work ever: his visit to Hiroshima. That part of the book affected me so much I put it down and put my head in my arms for about five minutes, just so overcome with horror the world we live in. I had to remind myself that really horrible things happen in war on all sides before I could continue.
I don't know if Sedaris is going to have a huge staying power. I'm guessing if he is going to last into the 22nd Century, he may be someone like Robert Benchley or Dorothy Parker, enjoyed by a dedicated group of people determined to search for him but forgotten by everyone else. I guess when they go back and read his books, When You Are Engulfed in Flames will be as a bump in the road. A turn into his future, whatever that may be.
I await with a sort of reluctant anticipation. I want to see what happens next, with a new selfish wish for him to stay as long as possible. Well, now that he's stopped smoking it should help.
* No relation between these two, by the way. Augusten changed his name from Chris Robison some time ago -- he didn't name himself after William, either. You probably already knew that, but my brother asked and I wondered if someone else might, too.
(Posts TBD soon: Touch Me, I'm Sick review; Shakespeare's Sonnets review; the beginnings of The Pickwick Papers: Abridged)
