Book Review--A Wolf at the Table, Augustin Burroughs

The universe sure didn't do Augusten Burroughs any favors in assigning him parents. Running with Scissors details his mother's mental illness and how she gave guardianship of him to her crazy psychiatrist when Augusten was 13. His life at the psychiatrist's house was truly chaotic and was actually painful to read, though very well done and very funny at times.

A Wolf at the Table is a prequel to Scissors, in which the focus is Augusten's life with his parents before he and his mother left and he started living at the psychiatrist's house. This is a departure from his earlier books in that it is very serious. While Augusten's mother may have been mentally ill, his father seems to have been truly evil. I'm not sure if it was alcoholism that made his father that way, or maybe something in his genes or early life experiences. Probably some combination of all three. Augusten's father actually had a pretty good life until he was about eight or so. He was born to teenage parents, and to help them out, his paternal grandfather and three teen-aged aunts took him in and took very good care of him, which was great until the teen-aged parents, now in their 20s, reclaimed him. Then things weren't so great. His father, Augusten's grandfather, was a very angry man, though no one was sure what caused the anger. He also drank to excess. Augusten's grandmother, Carolyn, was terrified of her husband's anger and thus not much help in protecting her son.

The cycle was repeated with Augusten's parents. Augusten and his mother would sometimes move out of the house because his mother believed they weren't safe there. While his mother had some serious problems of her own, she was right in believing that her husband was capable of violence. In reading this, I was only sorry that it took them as long as it did to make a clean break. With Augusten, there was a complete lack of an emotional connection, and it was heartbreaking to see the little boy rejected time and again by his father.

This was a difficult book to read because it was so disturbing, but very readable and well done.