With
A Wolf at the Table, memoirist Augusten Burroughs turns to his childhood before the events he chronicled in
Running with Scissors. The center of this new memoir is his father, a hard-drinking alcoholic who suffered from psoriasis and a growing mental illness. His father was emotionally distant, intimidating, and psychologically abusive. At one point his mother suffered a nervous breakdown and Augusten was left to live alone with his father, and would find his father sharpening knives and standing over him while he slept. Even as an adult, he has to wonder how much of his father is part of whom he's become.
A Wolf at the Table has received mixed reviews with the Rocky Mountain News saying, "With his new book,
A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father, Burroughs breaks our hearts. Big time. And in such a way that readers will be left clutching after the wickedly funny anecdotes peppered throughout the book as if they were long overdue gasps of air."
