Quotes of the Day
At the age of 8 Augusten Burroughs was driven to drink by Bewitched. "I worshipped Darren Stevens the First," he writes in his new memoir, Dry (St. Martin's; 293 pages). "When he'd come home from work, Samantha would say, 'Darren, would you like me to fix you a drink?' He'd always rest his briefcase on the table below the mirror in the foyer ... and say, 'Better make it a double.'" Burroughs would uncap one of his father's liquor bottles, upend it with his hand pressed over the top, then recap it and lick his palm.
In last year's improbably hilarious best seller Running with Scissors, Burroughs told the story of his decidedly unconventional adolescence: when he was 13, his wildly neurotic mother effectively gave him away to her psychiatrist, who raised him in a ramshackle house with a menagerie of patients. Dry is the story of what happened next, and it is no less bizarre.
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At 19, with only an elementary school education, Burroughs landed a job at Ogilvy & Mather and in short order became a Manhattan adman with a six-figure salary. "It was just thrilling," he remembers over lunch at the sort of expense-account restaurant frequented by Manhattan admen. "I thought I would end up in a mental hospital, or pumping gas for the rest of my life."
Maybe too thrilling. Burroughs quickly became a high-functioning alcoholic who downed a liter of Dewar's a night and sprayed Donna Karan for Men on his tongue to hide the smell at work. "To this day," he writes in Dry, his art director at the ad firm "has never forgiven me for calling one of our clients at home at two in the morning and initiating phone sex." You can see why she packed him off to rehab. Burroughs spent a month at an all-gay clinic in Minnesota.
Act II of Dry finds Burroughs back on the streets of Manhattan — that cocktail tray of an island — fighting off cravings for booze, dating a beautiful, wealthy, crack-addicted Prince Charming and continuing his misadventures as a high-flying adman (the behind-the-jingles tour of the advertising world is worth the price of admission on its own). Beneath the quick-flowing, funny-sad surface of Burroughs' prose lurks considerable complexity: wherever he goes, whatever he's doing, you can feel how badly he wants to drink — as well as the sadness from which that desire comes and the courage it takes to make the sadness so funny, all at the same time. If anything, Dry is even more compelling than Burroughs' first outing, if only because the material is less rich: he is less the walking quirk this time and more just a brave, funny, unhappy human being.
These days Burroughs is finally getting a taste of — and for — a more normal life. "This is something I've never done," he says excitedly. "I'm like a tourist in daily life, and it's riveting!" With Dry in stores and Scissors en route to the big screen, Burroughs is finishing up his next book (working title: Magical Thinking). With all this normality, is he running out of material? "Catastrophes seem to find me," he says. "I grew up in a little town in nowhere, Massachusetts, and one day these men rolled up in a black van and started casting a Tang commercial ..." It should be a while before he runs dry.
- Lev Grossman