Books : A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312342029
ISBN: 0312342020
Label: St. Martin's Press
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Sales Rank: 1283
Studio: St. Martin's Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
“As a little boy, I had a dream that my father had taken me to the woods where there was a dead body. He buried it and told me I must never tell. It was the only thing we’d ever done together as father and son, and I promised not to tell. But unlike most dreams, the memory of this one never left me. And sometimes…I wasn’t altogether sure about one thing: was it just a dream?”
When Augusten Burroughs was small, his father was a shadowy presence in his life: a form on the stairs, a cough from the basement, a silent figure smoking a cigarette in the dark. As Augusten grew older, something sinister within his father began to unfurl. Something dark and secretive that could not be named.
Betrayal after shocking betrayal ensued, and Augusten’s childhood was over. The kind of father he wanted didn’t exist for him. This father was distant, aloof, uninterested…
And then the “games” began.
With A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs makes a quantum leap into untapped emotional terrain: the radical pendulum swing between love and hate, the unspeakably terrifying relationship between father and son. Told with scorching honesty and penetrating insight, it is a story for anyone who has ever longed for unconditional love from a parent. Though harrowing and brutal, A Wolf at the Table will ultimately leave you buoyed with the profound joy of simply being alive. It’s a memoir of stunning psychological cruelty and the redemptive power of hope.
Amazon.com Review:
Amazon Significant Seven, April 2008: When I started reading A Wolf at the Table, I thought I knew what to expect. Augusten Burroughs captures intense experience with an inexplicably cool remove, imparting a stillness and purity to emotions that would likely run amok in anyone else's hands. I love this quality of his writing, and it's present in full force in this memoir of a childhood spent in thrall to a predatory and deeply unpredictable father. What I wasn't prepared for was the suspense--the dread-filled, nearly sonorous waiting for the worst to happen. An artful sort of bait-and-switch happens in the telling: Burroughs brings you to the brink of a terrible catharsis more than once, but the break in tension never comes. It is profoundly sad, remarkably tender, and fueled by a sense of love and reverence that only a child knows. --Anne Bartholomew
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Hitler was somebody's father. Not actually true, but he could have been. Stalin was somebody's father, how's that? A Wolf at the Table explores Burroughs relationship with his father, continuing to flesh out the story from his earlier memoir. The story is brutally honest, or at least it seems so. A son who desperately wants his father's love and never truly understands that his father was never worthy of the effort. Do you have to love your father just because he's your father?
One suspects once again that Burroughs, who changed his name to sounded more "literary," is engaging in great liberties with the truth. So what? I never understood why he was so defensive about Running With Scissors (which, due to a lawsuit, had the word "memoir" stripped from it). The memoir form is supposed to represent the author's experience, not the letter of what happened.
Also I must note it's a terrible, heavy-handed title. Why not call it My Father Was Bad Man. The book exceeds the title.
Rating:  -
From the cover photo of the bent fork, the book builds to present the father as a menacing entity in the midst of seemingly neutral behavior (emotionally distant at best). It's about as edgy as you can get, not sure if the next paragraph will unveil the true "wolf" or if it will be tempered with sympathy for the father's pain. Awesome.
Rating: -
We've read much about the dysfunction of Augusten Burroughs's life, starting with his 2002 memoir "Running With Scissors" in which he described the bizarre experience of living with his mother's psychiatrist during the tumult of his adolescence. Though he briefly touched upon his parents' broken marriage in that memoir, he takes a magnifying glass to it here in "A Wolf At The Table", a book centered around the severely strained and demoralizing relationship between Augusten and his father John G. Robison, a former professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
With broad beastly strokes, Burroughs paints a dark portrait of his father, an alcoholic who neglected him as well as treated him like an ultimate hindrance and burden. The problems with Burroughs's mother Margaret are revisited, her consistent escapes from the horror of their home and her constant warnings of "your father isn't safe to be around" creating an early stigma. The problems of his older brother John Elder Robison are also hinted at; Robison published his own memoir in 2007 about coping with Asperger's syndrome.
Burroughs's writes of wanting physical affection so badly from his father that he went to ridiculous measures to achieve it, all to no avail. At 6 years of age, he realizes that his father offers more affection towards the family dog Cream and in response fashions a canine get-up from construction paper. He even goes so far as to confiscate some of his ... Read More
Rating:  -
After reading positive reviews, I was looking forward to this book. But I wasn't entertained or informed (two things I like in books).
Instead I found a book that moved too slowly, with details that I didn't find relevant or important to the reader such as supermarket expeditions, septic systems installed etc. (obviously to the author they had greater relevance, but I was bored reading them). The story didn't seem to flow very well, and because of this, I found myself skim reading over some paragraphs in order to find something more interesting in the tale.
As memoirs go, its not a great one...........
Rating: -
If you looking for the same acerbic and self-mocking humor that made you enjoy the other Burroughs book DO NOT READ this book. Burroughs includes a handful of humorous jokes in this book, but by and large it is a meditation on the deep-seated hatred he has for his biological father. As he remembers it he never had a real father son relationship with his father. Never played catch with and clearly never got any advice from his father. Augusten is able to paint an almost inhumane picture of the very man that helped spawn him.
The first 100 pages are rather slow and the episodes reveal the common theme that Augusten's father was not ever a father and was more a sociopathic alcoholic than an adult qualified to have children. The second half of the book is written better with more details on the impact his father had on his life. The anecdotes are more telling and Augusten's pain comes through lucidly. One can't help but think Augusten wants the reader to feel sorry for him. The other books, while they are humorous, the anecdotes are depressing and when you think back to his previous books you can't help but think, Augusten's terribly childhood, especially his lack of relationship with his alcoholic father naturally lead him to his own reckless lifestyle.
Thankfully many of the anecdotes in this book are new to paper, but the book is just so depressing.
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