A Fair Trade Book
Title: Dry
Title: Dry
Publisher: Picador
Date: 2003
ISBN: 0-312-42379-9
Length: 309 pages
Quote: “I was awake by six A.M. and
still felt drunk...This is when I knew I was still drunk. I just had
way too much energy for six A.M.”
Although it's subtitled “A Memoir,”
Dry reads like a novel and
has an opening disclaimer to the effect that, to a substantial
extent, it is one. This is, after all, the same Augusten Burroughs
who claimed to have been abandoned by his parents and brought up by a
so-called psychologist who sodomized and prostituted him from the
time he reached puberty until he got a job...in the advertising
industry. With a background as similar as that to the classic Prozac
Dementia pseudomemory, it's hard to believe that we know anything about the author of Burroughs' books.
Whoever
Burroughs really is, though, he's funny most of the time, with a tolerable dose of emotional catharsis tucked away in each
story. Such that you can almost overlook that this is a story about a
homosexual man who thinks he's in love with another homosexual man,
until a platonic male friend dies, and then he really knows
what love and pain feel like. He falls off the Alcoholics Anonymous
wagon, onto which he's been shoved by co-workers as a requirement for
him to keep his job. He climbs back on. He keeps his job. For the
moment, at least, he's safe, alive, and dry.
Is this book part
of a sinister plot to make the homosexual lifestyle seem more
acceptable to the book-reading community? Actually, it probably is.
Does reading it have that effect? Actually, it probably doesn't.
Actually, if you have an intense emotional attraction-repulsion thing
going toward either the homosexual lifestyle or the drugs, violence,
prostitution, free-floating hostility, and general self-destruction
associated with it, you probably don't want to read this book. If you
do want to read this book, you're either part of that lifestyle, or
else far enough from it to feel detached, even compassionate, while
reading about Love and Loss in the Underworld.
If you
read it, you will laugh. You may cry. You will laugh again, after
crying. And if you're one of us “straight” people—the word
“straight” meant a lot more than “heterosexual” in the 1980s, when it started being used to mean merely that—one of us sober, law-abiding, family-type people, you will give thanks; I can't
imagine any reader of Dry finishing
the book and thinking “I want to be like the narrator of this
story.” More likely you'll think “Even as a trade for his
talent and his sense of humor I wouldn't want to be like the narrator
of this story.”
You might feel more compassion, more empathy, toward somebody like the narrator of this story--at the office, e.g. And would that make you more inclined to cut that person more slack, or would it make you want to "help" the person Hit Bottom and Turn Around, the way the narrator does?
Burroughs is alive; therefore Dry is a Fair Trade Book. $5 per copy + $5 per package = $10, of which 10%, or $1, will be sent to Burroughs or a charity of his choice. (If you want four paperback copies, you'd send us $25 and we'd send Burroughs or his charity $4.) Payment may be sent to either address at the bottom of the screen.
You might feel more compassion, more empathy, toward somebody like the narrator of this story--at the office, e.g. And would that make you more inclined to cut that person more slack, or would it make you want to "help" the person Hit Bottom and Turn Around, the way the narrator does?
Burroughs is alive; therefore Dry is a Fair Trade Book. $5 per copy + $5 per package = $10, of which 10%, or $1, will be sent to Burroughs or a charity of his choice. (If you want four paperback copies, you'd send us $25 and we'd send Burroughs or his charity $4.) Payment may be sent to either address at the bottom of the screen.
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