by Augusten Burroughs
St. Martin's Press (October 27, 2009)
Genre: Essays; Humor
Summary in a Sentence:
Augusten Burroughs recounts moments and experiences from seven Christmases, describing how he crafted gingerbread tenements, woke up next to Kris Kringle, and more.
My Thoughts:
Burroughs is back, this time with a Christmas memoir. I first discovered Burroughs about 3 years ago and read every book he had written to date in one month. My friend and I both fell in love with him during the same summer. He is so irreverent and brutally honest. I wrote down pages and pages of quotations as I read
Dry and
Magical Thinking. Needless to say, I practically peed on myself when I found out he was coming out with another book.
Alas, this memoir starts out rocky for me. Arranged chronologically, his first two or three stories are funny, but not overly so, and something about the first story made me downright uncomfortable. There were great moments, though. Burroughs goes into great detail of his long battle of alcoholism in his memoir
Dry, and "Why do you reward me thus" features a Christmas when he goes on a drinking binge and literally wakes up huddled between two honest-to-goodness homeless bums.Or how about waking up next to a fat and dirty Santa in "Ask again later"?
Where Burroughs truly shines is when he is talking about his relationships with George and Dennis. His writing that at times can be crude and completely in your face is immediately tender when talking about those he has loved in the collection's last two stories, "The Best and Only
Everything" and "Silent Night." Fans of the irreverent memoir or of Augusten's earlier work will appreciate most of the stories in the collection, especially the last two.
This book counts towards the
Four Month Challenge.
Rating: 3/5
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