Augusten Burroughs: Dry, A Memoir & Magical Thinking, True Stories

The author of modern American folk tale Dry is one of the millions of people in mainstream commercial life who can function only through the good offices of their therapists.

Burroughs is an alcoholic who has to attend to his own problem — and this book is mainly about that — but he lives among colleagues and friends who are constantly in need of help for a range of personality disorders, either real or, fashionable, often both.

Dry is an account of the author's adventures at a rehabilitation clinic, to which he has been sent because of his alcoholism by the New York advertising agency that employs him. He pours out the withering first impressions of the clinic and its low-life inmates — which is how he sees them, rather than as fellow patients, because, as you come to understand, that is how he always sees the world.

Burroughs is gay, and throughout the book, flashbacks to childhood abuse set out some of the reasons for the psychological problems which are part cause of his addiction.

This is a pretty standard story of the sort written many times by literate people who are alcohol or drug dependents and recover enough to be able to write about it: addiction, attempts to come clean, lapses and then either failure and, well, death, or a final reconciliation that this is a disease they can cope with only one way, by sharing it around a group of like people and working through it day by day.

So the test of a book like this is partly the particularised human experience but mostly how well and insightfully the story is told. Burroughs is an advertising copywriter, and it shows. He has a hair-trigger mind that fires verbal volleys off in all directions and produces a narrative that is slick, pacy, occasionally funny but rarely moving.

Although Magical Thinking is billed as a collection of "true stories", that won't wash with anyone whose idea of truth has any attachment to objectivity. The stories may be true as far as the incidents depicted occurred, but they are filtered through the author's truly hyper-kinetic imagination. Burroughs warns us that magical thinking is: "A schizotypal personality disorder attributing to one's own actions something that had nothing to do with him or her and thus assuming that one has a greater influence over events than is actually the case."

So this collection is another memoir, a confessional, an exercise in self-obsession which becomes tiresome. For example: "I'm terrified of what sort of parent I would make. First, because I am startlingly self-centred. I require hours alone each day to write about myself.

"And I have a wide, deep cruel streak. This is not something I am proud of. But it's a fact I've come to accept about myself. Maybe I'll bring it up in therapy, after I have addressed my other issues ..."

If he had any self-esteem to start with, he keeps it at bay with self-denigration. Amusing for a while, attracts sympathy for a little longer, but it becomes an ugly form of self-flagellation. He has nothing compassionate or kind to say about others, except genuine love for one man and a kind of fawning affection for one or two other lovers. I wish him well on his journey through life but I would rather not accompany him further.

* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer and reviewer.
* Dry, A Memoir: Hodder, $26.99
* Magical Thinking, True Stories: Hodder, $34.66