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After the family that Augusten Burroughs described as the "Finches" in his best-selling memoir Running with Scissors sued him for defamation and fraud, and after The Smoking Gun outed James Frey as a fabulist, no one would blame Burroughs' publisher for being extra-careful with his new collection of autobiographical essays.
So St. Martin's removed the subtitle "true stories" from Possible Side Effects and added an author's note making clear that many events were changed and that several of the friends he describes are composites.
Does the "truthiness" matter? Not really. Burroughs is less a memoirist than a comic; we expect our satirists to embellish and exaggerate just as we realize that MTV's The Real World is edited.
What's unfortunate, however, is that St. Martin's didn't provide an author's note that would have actually helped readers. Something like: "This book is the product of cleaning out my hard drive and finding everything I cut from my first books."
In Running With Scissors and Dry, Burroughs told stories of addiction and childhood torment that were both harrowing and comic. He perfected his deliciously dark sensibility in his first collection, Magical Thinking.
But these essays take on tired topics and don't dig deeply enough. Burroughs dredges out stories about his irrational fear of the tooth fairy and a love of McDonald's, and offers insights on the differences between the USA and England that are so cliched it's as if he wrote them down after five minutes of watching the BBC in a hotel room. ("The United Kingdom is at once familiar, and totally foreign.")
It's as if he has run out of interesting personal material to mine. So Burroughs returns to his advertising days with a 10-year-old story about working on the Junior Mints account that feels like an outtake from Dry. He goes back to the Scissors era and recounts the trauma of having hands that easily became dry, cracked and bloody, but the tone falls flat, never achieving poignancy or wit.
There's no shame in having only two brilliant memoirs in you. But Burroughs ought to be embarrassed by this lazy effort.
Instead of writing about his lecture tours or digging out decade-old stories, he ought to be collecting new experiences and working on a novel. It's time for Burroughs to put in the effort and become what people have long accused him of being -- a great fiction writer.
Possible Side Effects
By Augusten Burroughs
St. Martin's, 291 pp., $23.95
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