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106th out of 1,868 books
—
3,698 voters
Possible Side Effects
National Bestseller
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors comes Augusten Burroughs's most provocative collection of true stories yet. From nicotine gum addiction to lesbian personal ads to incontinent dogs, Possible Side Effects mines Burroughs's life in a series of uproariously funny essays. These are stories that are uniquely Augusten, wit...more
Paperback, 291 pages
Published
April 17th 2007
by Picador
(first published May 2nd 2006)
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Another great book from one of my favorite authors. I bought this for my dad as well. He also loved it.
Favorite quotes:
Although my parents never attended church or mentioned Jesus except when they screamed at each other—and then they used his full name, 'Jesus Fucking Christ'.
I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.
The thing...more
Favorite quotes:
Although my parents never attended church or mentioned Jesus except when they screamed at each other—and then they used his full name, 'Jesus Fucking Christ'.
I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.
The thing...more
I enjoyed Running With Scissors as much as anyone else who enjoys a read that makes your family look significantly less fucked up, so I decided that I'd give Possible Side Effects a shot. I found this book to be a lot less organized than Running With Scissors, and the essays themselves offered little to no payoff. Most of them end in the "and then I found $50." fashion that is consistent with Burroughs's essay writing. The difference here is that the essays in Running With Scissors were signific...more
Augusten Burroughs is that wonderfully witty guy in the cubicle behind the filing cabinet who sends you snarky e-mails about your co-worker's shoes and your boss' receding hairline. Oh, how I wish I knew this guy in person! Fortunately, with "Possible Side Effects" I can pretend for a while that he is on my speed dial.
"Side Effects" is another collection of stories of dysfunctional relationships, love affairs gone awry, childhood horror stories, and more tales of life in the big city. Though he...more
"Side Effects" is another collection of stories of dysfunctional relationships, love affairs gone awry, childhood horror stories, and more tales of life in the big city. Though he...more
Jun 18, 2008
Gk
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
people who took high school musicals seriously
Shelves:
memoir
Like reaching past the Harvest Wheat and grabbing the Coco Puffs and loving it.
I don't know if it's a new thing but, there seems to be a developing genre of authors who's focus is on their own lives, which have been tortured by mental illness and any number of substance abuse problems. Actually, when I stop to think about it, maybe this style has been around longer than I think. Jack Kerouac? Ernest Hemingway?
Whether it is a new genre or not, Augusten Burroughs' writing falls squarely in this realm. "Possible Side Effects" is a collection of hilarious but also often sad es...more
Whether it is a new genre or not, Augusten Burroughs' writing falls squarely in this realm. "Possible Side Effects" is a collection of hilarious but also often sad es...more
Sep 26, 2007
Kelly
rated it
2 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Augusten Burroughs fans
Shelves:
memoirs
YAWN
The first few stories bored me to tears. Boy loses tooth, NEXT! Man spends days in London hotel room watching BBC, stuffing his fat face and bashing Americans. Ok. Men acquire naughty puppy. zzz I don't need my books to be action-packed, but the pace of these essays is so slow that even the punctuation is starting to piss me off. Sentence fragments galore make for an even slower read. In the subsequent stories I have chuckled a few times, but I am irritated at Mr. Burrough's masturbatory met...more
The first few stories bored me to tears. Boy loses tooth, NEXT! Man spends days in London hotel room watching BBC, stuffing his fat face and bashing Americans. Ok. Men acquire naughty puppy. zzz I don't need my books to be action-packed, but the pace of these essays is so slow that even the punctuation is starting to piss me off. Sentence fragments galore make for an even slower read. In the subsequent stories I have chuckled a few times, but I am irritated at Mr. Burrough's masturbatory met...more
This is not the side-slitting, gasping-for-air, hysterical laugh-crying at the hilarious wrongness of RUNNING WITH SCISSORS. But it's a great palate-cleanser after RUNNING: I grew to love the little dude, and I'm just glad Augusten has lived to tell the tale(s).
This is a collection of brief pieces, mostly featuring the adult Augusten in moments of self-awareness and dot-connecting. His love for his partner and his disgusting bulldogs is touching, but I liked this collection best at its most obse...more
This is a collection of brief pieces, mostly featuring the adult Augusten in moments of self-awareness and dot-connecting. His love for his partner and his disgusting bulldogs is touching, but I liked this collection best at its most obse...more
Reminiscent of the works of David Sedaris (amusing anecdotes told tongue-in-cheek and very much informed by the sexual identity of the author) these stories lack the reluctant depth that keeps Sedaris afloat. Although Burroughs has clearly endured some trying experiences, he lacks either the writing chops or the perspective to transfer them to the page in a non-static way. Although some of his tales are lovely and funny, some of them fall quite flat, as though tossed in between the real stories...more
Possible Side Effects shows us more than anything that Burroughs is living a happy, successful life. While still haunted by demons from his perilous childhood, he has conquered many of them, and the rest he lives with. I find it hard to not be happy that Burroughs has reached this pinnacle in his life. He certainly deserves it. However, it's not as interesting to read about his happy life with his partner Dennis or his success as an author as it is to read about him living with his mom's shrink...more
An enjoyable enough collection of essays by the author of Running with Scissors and Dry. None of these pieces appears to have been published in a magazine before this anthology, and editing may have helped some of them. The quality varies, with many pieces relying on a sort of weak rim-shot punchline. Some pieces read like out-takes from Running with Scissors. As compared to both Dry and Magical Thinking, the "Augusten" narrator is not as snippy and cruel in this collection. His own vulnerabilit...more
I am about halfway through this collection of autobiographical essays, and I love it every bit as much as I loved "Magical Thinking." Burroughs presents himself as this detached, selfish, self-absorbed man, but the stories he shares reveal him to be a tenderhearted person who is acutely aware of his foibles.
I love reading about his relationship with Dennis. I love that he marvels that someone as wonderful as Dennis could love him so much. Their unabashed adoration of their dogs hits home with me...more
I love reading about his relationship with Dennis. I love that he marvels that someone as wonderful as Dennis could love him so much. Their unabashed adoration of their dogs hits home with me...more
You want to know why I love Augusten Burroughs so? Because he writes sentences like this:
“And with these words – I don’t think you’re supposed to be aware of your own heartbeat – this unknown woman in a burnt orange poncho doomed me to a life of pathological overawareness of my own cardiac activity.”
That right there is just fucking brilliant writing.
The chapter entitled "The Wisdom Tooth" where they stay at an inn owned by a doll collector is classic. That essay should be studied in colleges e...more
“And with these words – I don’t think you’re supposed to be aware of your own heartbeat – this unknown woman in a burnt orange poncho doomed me to a life of pathological overawareness of my own cardiac activity.”
That right there is just fucking brilliant writing.
The chapter entitled "The Wisdom Tooth" where they stay at an inn owned by a doll collector is classic. That essay should be studied in colleges e...more
Augusten Burroughs and I, in many ways, may have been seperated at birth (disregarding the age difference issue). We both think London is the perfect place and secretly wish were were British. (Why did we seperate anyway? Oh yeah...the freedom thing...) We are both more or less anti-social when it comes to...well, people...we are both totally creeped out by dolls and neither of us like to touch anything outside our homes without disinfecting them first. Most importantly, we worship our pets. (Bu...more
From my blog: I just finished Augusten Burroughs' fifth book (and fourth memoir) and even though the whole James-Frey-A-Million-Little-Pieces-Got-Caught-Lying-to-Oprah thing has had more than its 15 minutes, here I go starting it all up again.
It is hard to say anything bad about someone's memoir (I'm talking bad writing and egotistical promotion aside - see: A Fractured Mind by Robert Oxman). I mean the definition alone (a narrative composed from personal experience) indicates that the book is a...more
It is hard to say anything bad about someone's memoir (I'm talking bad writing and egotistical promotion aside - see: A Fractured Mind by Robert Oxman). I mean the definition alone (a narrative composed from personal experience) indicates that the book is a...more
This is the first book that I've read by Burroughs, though I saw the movie version of "Running with Scissors" and had a sense of Burroughs' back story going into reading this book. Generally well written, the book is a bit of a one-note song. Like David Sedaris, Burroughs relies on acid wit and eccentric depictions and characterizations of the people who populate his essays that are at times, over the top. There is humor, but it is often based on revulsion, foibles, and neurosis - i.e. at the ex...more
In "Running With Scissors", I flat out didn't believe Burroughs. I felt that his story was probably 50% true. There is nothing wrong with someone writing a memoir and stretching the truth, but I couldn't shake the feeling that he was flat out lying. Along with his horrifyingly vivid description of his early teen sexual experience with a 30 year old man, I felt like he was trying to hard to be shocking for the sake of being shocking. I enjoyed his style, but I had a hard time respecting him.
In "...more
In "...more
This collection of memoir essays covers everything from blind-dating lesbians to incontinent dogs, and a wide assortment of topics in between. It would be difficult to identify a specific theme among these topics, save perhaps the cause-and-effect relationships that seem to guide the scrapes and gaffes we all encounter in daily living. Burroughs takes the mundane and makes it funny, and if that doesn't work, he hyperbolizes it to death until you just have to laugh because it is so darned strange...more
This book happened to be around and I saw that it was the author of Running With Scissors (a book I was interested in, admittedly after I saw trailers for the film years ago, which I also never saw), so I read it. I was really interested at first, but I found the book to be a bit... lacking. In what I am not entirely sure, but by the time I realized that I did not like it I was halfway through the book and found myself somewhat committed. Also it was easy to read and interesting, even if I was d...more
Most of this book’s chapters were laugh-out-loud hilarious. While I truly enjoyed the majority of the book, my enthusiasm was dampened a bit by the author’s stories about his experiences buying dogs.
“Kitty, Kitty,” chronicles the author’s short-lived ownership of a Wheaten terrier puppy named, well, KittyKitty. Burroughs impulsively buys the dog at a time when his life is in shambles and he is in no place to take on the responsibility of a pet. He would have had an excuse, I suppose, if he were...more
“Kitty, Kitty,” chronicles the author’s short-lived ownership of a Wheaten terrier puppy named, well, KittyKitty. Burroughs impulsively buys the dog at a time when his life is in shambles and he is in no place to take on the responsibility of a pet. He would have had an excuse, I suppose, if he were...more
This was my first experience of the author and any of his 'story' - though of course I'm familiar with the title Running with Scissors. Just reading the description of RWS made me instantly put it down every time - it consistently brought the 'ick' response. That said, I LOVED Possible Side Effects. I listened to it in the car and found it greatly entertaining and thought-provoking, in spite of many interruptions. I had NO expectations, but I thought the promo details on the jacket were clever....more
It's so good. Another collection of stories from Burrough's life. It's not one of those things where he has just had a more interesting life than the rest of us (but let's face it-he has); mostly he just sees the humor in life and is able to tell us about it in a way that has you rolling on the floor. And believe me-I was.
He is just so honest. How can you not just drink it in? Being able to laugh at yourself and be vulnerable at the same time . . . it's a thing of beauty.
One of my favorite stori...more
He is just so honest. How can you not just drink it in? Being able to laugh at yourself and be vulnerable at the same time . . . it's a thing of beauty.
One of my favorite stori...more
In case you didn't know, this, along with "Magical Thinking", is a book of short stories. ("Magical Thinking" received better reviews on both goodreads.com but the same rating on Amazon. I'll read MT sometime soon and you'll probably see a comparison in that review.)
Not as good as Dry or Running With Scissors, but it's a quick read. I wouldn't recommend reading them all (unless you're just completely bored). Here is what I'd consider "required" and "optional" reading. (Not all of the stories are...more
Not as good as Dry or Running With Scissors, but it's a quick read. I wouldn't recommend reading them all (unless you're just completely bored). Here is what I'd consider "required" and "optional" reading. (Not all of the stories are...more
Sep 02, 2009
Mallory
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
fans of Burroughs, short-fiction enthusiasts
Augusten Burroughs is a fantastic writer. Dry is a fantastic book - funny, heartbreaking, insane, moving, all the words you want to use to describe a memoir - and Running with Scissors is hysterical and troubling. This book is a collection of short works, which, while still good reading, falls short of Burroughs' standard.
Burroughs' short fiction, in my opinion, lacks the depth of his other writing. Some stories are incredible, but a lot of them fall short of the mark. My biggest problem is with...more
Burroughs' short fiction, in my opinion, lacks the depth of his other writing. Some stories are incredible, but a lot of them fall short of the mark. My biggest problem is with...more
If you can believe the author’s bio, Augusten Burroughs is one of the top fifteen funniest people in America. I tend to agree. After reading (and throughly enjoying) three of his previous books I had a pretty good feeling that 1. I would laugh and 2. I would probably gasp from shock at least once. I was not disappointed.
“Possible Side Effects” is a collection of stories-memories that Burroughs has stored away through out his lifetime. Spanning from childhood until very recently, the anecdotes he...more
“Possible Side Effects” is a collection of stories-memories that Burroughs has stored away through out his lifetime. Spanning from childhood until very recently, the anecdotes he...more
'Possible Side Effects' is a series of short stories written by Augusten Burroughs. The author is careful in this book to note that not all of the stories are exactly true and that individuals and events detailed in the narratives may be composites of individuals. The small print aside, readers will recognize many of the themes from other memoirs that Burroughs has written.
I've typically listened to Burroughs, rather than reading hard copy. It may be my current pressure at work or too much caffe...more
I've typically listened to Burroughs, rather than reading hard copy. It may be my current pressure at work or too much caffe...more
Okay, probably not fair that I say I read this book - I listened to it and here's a rule: authors - never, ever read your own work. I knew it before I put it in my CD player when it said "read by the author" - I am enjoying another of his books (in writing) and have my own voice for him in my head. Not saying my voice is better (well it is) but I don't want to be close to the author - I need a layer in between. The book started out funny and I have no idea what it's about - is it a memoir? But t...more
I really liked Running with Scissors. I know some of it was disturbingly wrong, but it was so so funny. Knowing that story, I know he couldn't have possibly escaped without some neuroses, if not flat out damage.
Possible Side Effects shows those neuroses in full light. It is told with a self-deprecating sense of humor and a general deviance. In this collection, he convinces a lesbian friend to write the longest personal ad New York Magazine has ever seen and then tricks her into sabotaging the re...more
Possible Side Effects shows those neuroses in full light. It is told with a self-deprecating sense of humor and a general deviance. In this collection, he convinces a lesbian friend to write the longest personal ad New York Magazine has ever seen and then tricks her into sabotaging the re...more
Augusten Burroughs offers a post?James Frey "dishonesty disclaimer" (New York Times) at the beginning of Possible Side Effects, a provocation that has reviewers scouring the essay collection for signs of the improbable. Sure enough, there's plenty of material that fits the bill, but critics don't seem to mind the tall tales as long as they're in on the joke. The loudest complaints are that the new book mostly retreads the best-selling Running with Scissors (***1/2 Nov/Dec 2002) and Dry and that
...more
After reading "Running with Scissors," I have to say that this book is somewhat of a disappointment. The first couple of stories decidedly neither entertaining nor funny. The story of his purchasing a defective french bulldog is just too much a luxury problem for me to have any empathy or patience for.
Mr. Burroughs is better off sticking to the wealth of humiliating and gut wrenching material of being an anxiety ridden teen or an utterly broken down alcoholic who is at the end of his drinking c...more
Mr. Burroughs is better off sticking to the wealth of humiliating and gut wrenching material of being an anxiety ridden teen or an utterly broken down alcoholic who is at the end of his drinking c...more
Augusten Burroughs is hilarious. If you haven't read anything he's written, you must give him a try.
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| read it yet? | 6 | 33 | Jun 29, 2012 02:03pm |
Augusten Burroughs born Christopher Robison, son of poet and writer Margaret Robison and younger brother of John Elder Robison.
Burroughs has no formal education beyond elementary school. A very successful advertising copywriter for over seventeen years, he was also an alcoholic who nearly drank himself to death in 1999. But spurned by a compulsion he did not understand, Burroughs began to write a...more
More about Augusten Burroughs...
Burroughs has no formal education beyond elementary school. A very successful advertising copywriter for over seventeen years, he was also an alcoholic who nearly drank himself to death in 1999. But spurned by a compulsion he did not understand, Burroughs began to write a...more
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“Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.”
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“...I don't think it's any more deceptive than wearing four-inch come-fuck-me pumps when one has no intention of ever fucking anybody.”
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