Then I sat on the custom-made couch I’d purchased several years earlier and had only used as a sort of open-format clothes dresser.

I stacked the mail that had collected into two neat piles: bills to throw in the trash and pretend never arrived and mail-order catalogues for later, bedtime reading. So I sprayed Windex on things and rubbed paper towels over them, and with my free hand I clutched my phone and spoke to my cousins and my grandmother. In the past, periods of sobriety would be spent making apologies to people for various things I did to them while under the inﬂuence. I supposed they did things like clean, speak to friends on the phone and drop their kids off at gymnastics practice. What did normal people do when they weren’t drinking? And I had no idea what to do with my sober self. I was feeling nearly electriﬁed with the discomfort of existing with a blood alcohol level at zero. It’s just that I’d written this journal only for me it wasn’t polite enough or interesting enough or funny enough for anyone else to read.ĭrybegan as nothing more ambitious than a journal I started the day I returned to New York City from rehab in Minnesota. Not because I revealed anything particularly secret beyond run-of-the-mill complaints about my brother’s greasy metallic aroma or the lack of buying power afforded by my pittance of an allowance. 21).When I was a kid, one of my many phobias was that somebody would read my diary. Though not a technique condoned by A.A., it certainly makes for a fascinating listening experience. (see audio review, below), Burroughs believes that when rehab is over, he must walk into a bar to see if he can resist the temptation to drink. Like James Frey in the similar yet very different book, A Million Little Pieces From Minnesota, Burroughs returns to New York and participates in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

It is an earnest and cautionary tale of calamity, brimming with Sedaris-like darkly comic quips: 'Making alcoholic friends is as easy as making sea monkeys.' Burroughs's slight Southern accent and gentle yet glib delivery should summon empathy on the listener's part that may have been lost with another reader. Burroughs's telling of the tale alternates among hilarious, pathetic, existential and hopeful. 'The truly odd part is that I really don't know how they got there,' admits Burroughs in this autobiographical tale of being a prodigy with an extremely successful career in advertising and a drive to get as wasted as possible as often as possible. This is what Burroughs ( Running with Scissors) encountered upon returning from Minnesota's Proud Institute (supposedly the Imagine coming home to find hundreds of empty scotch bottles and 1,452 empty beer bottles in your apartment.

Dry by augusten burroughs