Dry: A Memoir

published	April 1st 2004 by Picador
first published	2003
binding	Paperback
isbn	0312423799 (isbn13: 9780312423797)
pages	320
description	Fans of Augusten Burroughs's darkly funny memoir Running with Scissors were left wondering at the end of that book what would become of young A...more [close] Fans of Augusten Burroughs's darkly funny memoir Running with Scissors were left wondering at the end of that book what would become of young Augusten after his squalid and fascinating childhood ended. In Dry, we find that although adult Augusten is doing well professionally, earning a handsome living as an ad writer for a top New York agency, Burroughs's personal life is a disaster. His apartment is a sea of empty Dewar's bottles, he stays out all night boozing, and he dabs cologne on his tongue in an unsuccessful attempt to mask the stench of alcohol on his breath at work. When his employer insists he seek help, Burroughs ships out to Minnesota for detoxification, counseling, and amusingly told anecdotes about the use of stuffed animals in group therapy. But after a month of such treatment, he's back in Manhattan and tenuously sober. And while its one thing to lay off the sauce in rehab, Burroughs learns that it's quite another to resume your former life while avoiding the alcohol that your former life was based around. This quest to remain sober is made dramatically more difficult, and the tale more harrowing, when Burroughs begins an ill-advised romance with a crack addict. Certainly the "recovered alcoholic fighting to stay sober" tale is not new territory for a memoirist. But Burroughs's account transcends clichés: it doesn't adhere to the traditional "temptation narrowly resisted" storyline and it features, in Burroughs himself, a central character that is sympathetic even when he's neither likable nor admirable. But what ultimately makes this memoir such a terrific read is a brilliant and candid sense of humor that manages to stay dry even when recalling events where the author was anything but. --John Moe [close]
date added	01-09-07 edit book

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Mark rated it:

02/03/08

Read in January, 2005

After reading Dry I went over to Cedar Tavern for a martini. I don’t normally drink martinis, but according to Augusten Burroughs, the famous Cedar Tavern on University Place in Manhattan serves huge ones (“enormous; great bowls of vodka soup”) - so you get the most of what you pay for. But as it turned out their martinis are actually rather small, the opposite of Burroughs’ claim. And the bartender on the second floor told me that the martinis have been the same size for at least five y...more After reading Dry I went over to Cedar Tavern for a martini. I don’t normally drink martinis, but according to Augusten Burroughs, the famous Cedar Tavern on University Place in Manhattan serves huge ones (“enormous; great bowls of vodka soup”) - so you get the most of what you pay for. But as it turned out their martinis are actually rather small, the opposite of Burroughs’ claim. And the bartender on the second floor told me that the martinis have been the same size for at least five years since he began working there. So what the fuck is Burroughs talking about?
Not that I was surprised by this. While reading Dry – a “memoir” about overcoming the “disease” of alcoholism - I couldn’t help but think Burroughs had, um, invented many of the book’s anecdotes and conversations. The Cedar Tavern trip confirmed the suspicions.
Do a little research and discover the writer Augusten Burroughs as a liar on many levels. First, his real name is Christopher Robison. I can’t fully read his twisted mind, but it’s pretty clear the name-change is supposed to lend his authorial presence more grandeur. Is he trying to sound aristocratic? Sophisticated? British? As if he were William S. Burroughs’ son? Or what? You really should know you’re on the wrong track when you do the opposite of Mark Twain, who changed his high-sounding given name of Samuel Clemens into something people like Augusten Burroughs would likely describe as common.
About half of Dry is dialogue, and I wondered how Burroughs could recall all those intricate conversations, word for word, especially if he was drinking a liter of scotch every night, as he claims. We aren’t even given any prefatory disclaimer, as memoirs often issue, about how the conversations are recalled to the best of the author’s ability. Here’s a typical exchange (note that “Hayden” is a friend Burroughs met at their Minnesota-based rehab clinic):

Hayden is aghast. “That seems hostile,” he says.

“Rick’s a fuck. He’s a homophobic closet case and he hasn’t got an ounce of talent. He just hitched his wagon to Elenor years ago and she’s too busy to notice he’s as dumb as a box of hair.”
Hayden takes a long sip of water. “You have to keep an eye on this Rick person.”

For starters, even if you had remembered saying something as retarded as ‘dumb as a box of hair’ you wouldn’t publish it for the world to see, would you? Anyway, that’s simply not a line someone just improvises in the middle of a chat. That’s a line a bad writer cooks up because he can’t think of anything else to put down on the page. Hayden taking a ‘long’ sip of water (rather than, say, a short sip) is a nice touch, don’t ya think? That’s true literary talent right there for you.
The only part of Dry I didn’t hate is the very beginning when Burroughs is still routinely getting shit-faced. The buzz is officially killed on page 33 when he checks into rehab. It doesn’t even get dimly interesting again until page 257 after Burroughs falls off the wagon. The 200 or so pages in between are of course replete with a lot of AA/rehab talk and sermonizing. But mostly for Burroughs, the sober pages are just an excuse for the author to tell us all about himself and his dull relationships with co-workers and boyfriends. Unlike some of his fellow AA friends, he says he has no trouble staying sober, and even quickly stops attending meetings, so that he can instead focus the narrative on the drama of his relationships, whether we like it or not. Alcohol is rarely mentioned during these pages except when Burroughs feels the need to remind the reader that this is still a story about alcoholism. For instance, somewhere in the middle of the book, he concocts a tale about how he once went to a bar by himself and almost ordered a beer but then pulled himself together at the last second, settling for a Diet Coke. We are supposed to care and empathize with what is obviously an imagined scene. And then he’ll end certain sections by pretending to have a craved a drink at whatever point he’s at in his fascinating relationship memoir: “I have a sudden longing for a Cape Codder,” he’ll tell us, out of nowhere, leaving it at that. In hindsight, I realize these lines are intended to foreshadow his eventual return to drink. This is a story after all, so it really doesn’t matter if any of those longings actually happened.
In one scene after he quit drinking he describes emptying a bottle of scotch into the toilet: “I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, [sic] is of course, because I truly do not know myself. I cannot be sure I won’t attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.”
Sorry folks, but I’m just not buying this schlock. And I’m happy to say that I didn’t buy this schlock – the book was given as a gift. One flush wouldn’t get rid of the booze?? One flush wouldn’t prevent Burroughs from sticking his face into the toilet bowl to drink the (now alcohol-free) water? I don’t know how anyone could believe any of this. To begin with, Burroughs wasn’t that bad an alcoholic. He wasn’t knocking back cologne or anything. He’s a rich-boy, then advertising copywriter whose worst offense was to overindulge on martinis and Dewar’s, with perhaps a little blow on the side. If you quit that, you don’t fall off the wagon by drinking toilet water. You simply go to the liquor store and buy another bottle.
And I think this yarn is the winner: He tells us that his spacious Manhattan apartment is “clean and modern in design” except that it is ridden with empty liquor bottles. “Three hundred one-liter bottles of scotch…And when I used to drink beer instead of scotch, the beer bottles would collect. I counted the beer bottles once: one thousand, four hundred and fifty-two,” he writes, expecting to horrify us. Now, I don’t believe any of this for a second, but if it is actually true, then the trouble here is that Burroughs is just a fucking nutcase, and alcoholism is the least of his problems. Think about it: he spends his time inventing stories that he passes off as biography. That’s pretty twisted if you ask me.
Burroughs himself tells us that he didn’t even realize leaving thousands of empty bottles on the floor was abnormal, until the subject was brought up in rehab. He also pretends to have not known that the very purpose of rehab is to make people dry. Without a trace of irony, Burroughs writes, “Sober. So that’s what I’m here to become.” Yeah right, like he didn’t know. For some reason, I can’t help but think that this sort of contrived stupidity plays well with the American public.
So here’s my verdict on this book: Like other “memoir” specialists Dave Eggers and more notoriously James Frey, Burroughs’ only goal is self-promotion. The book is a con job written for the sort of people who consider themselves hip and liberal but secretly watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. Ostensibly the memoir is about alcoholism but like I said that’s not what it’s really about. The only subject discussed at length is Augusten Burroughs and all of his tedious relationships. “Dry” is definitely the operative word here, but not for the stated reason. Alcohol is just the decoy plot, so that the author and publisher can rationalize the appearance of yet another Burroughs reflection on his ordinary or otherwise tiresome life. There are no ideas in this book. No insights. No worthy discussion of booze and drugs. It is shallow, written, apparently, for fans of Elle, People and Time magazines and for Oprah Winfrey, as the laudatory quotes on the back of the book indicate. And this is what pathetically passes for good, edgy, humorous writing in America these days. And I suppose the question of whether it’s memoir or as I argue fiction is ultimately trumped by the unavoidable conclusion that this book is quite simply the literary equivalent of dog shit, not fit for consumption by anyone who has taste, never mind an ability to detect fraudulence.

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Erica rated it:

06/29/08

Read in June, 2008

Why are we all so obsessed with the alcoholic memoir? I read this quick read for book group in under three hours - which was about all the time it deserved. The literary tradition of great writers being alcoholics may fascinate those who never studied Beatnik literature or Hemingway in school. But to satisfy the niche of urban hipster- intellectuals who are looking for a step above Lindsay Lohan's faux-glamour adventures in US Weekly, this book was just an edited down version of James Frey's...more Why are we all so obsessed with the alcoholic memoir? I read this quick read for book group in under three hours - which was about all the time it deserved. The literary tradition of great writers being alcoholics may fascinate those who never studied Beatnik literature or Hemingway in school. But to satisfy the niche of urban hipster- intellectuals who are looking for a step above Lindsay Lohan's faux-glamour adventures in US Weekly, this book was just an edited down version of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which I read pre-pub date at age 21, on spring break at Canyon Ranch while detoxing from my own college escapades.

Although Frey was too audacious (and unethical, according to Oprah in 2006 and the recent issue of Vanity Fair...I cannot believe we're still talking about it) in his attempts to be a great memoirist through booz and borderline death, truth (whether 100% real or partially embellished) really can be stranger than fiction; and those who live to tell about it in a well-crafted way deserve credit. The one rule of good writing I learned in school, however, is: keep talk about digestion, bodily fluids, or any other vulgarities people really don't want to read about to a minimum. This is drugstore prose.

If we reduce Burrough's memoir to the level of a "quickie" that's as cheaply satisfying as a Danielle Steel novel, then his account of addiction, if well-documented, should read with as much vim and vigor as if we were chain-smoking it. But it doesn't. Subtract all the bloated summary of ingesting, vomiting, or verbal headache, and all we get is flat character development, flat dialogue, and a brief account of rehab/institutionalization that does not even begin to compare with the world of the "psychologically - impaired" as described to us in Girl, Interruped or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The book's literary mediocrity is as cut and dry as a glass of Two Buck Chuck marked up to $14 - which is what I paid for this paperback.

The only part of the memoir that was interesting was the advertising part. How on earth did he survive a meeting with clients at the Met while openly intoxicated? Overcome the real challenge of returning from rehab to a boss who sent him away and then expects him to gush full creative brilliance on a German beer account, when alcohol had seemingly been the tour-de-force behind his sarcastic copywriting banter in the first place? Perhaps he blames corporate BS and superficial brands as the cause of his deterioration...but it's probably his messed up parenting - which is clearly the more interesting part of his troubled life, as documented in Running With Scissors. ("Interesting" because it was made into a movie - if we're talking brands and $$s, that is.)

In the conclusion of Dry, his relationships fizzle, his significant other dies, and we are left with grotesque images of crack-cocaine and death that made me question why I was even bothering to finish this sophomoric and soporific "been there" "done that" Truth or Dare sharing. I felt like I'd forced myself to finish something that was all suds with little sustenance. Or stayed up for a party that was totally not worth it.

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