Possible Side Effects: True Stories - Augusten Burroughs

...book.

When Possible Side Effects arrived, I read the blurbs on the back cover: a quote from the Oprah Magazine tells me that the book is ‘Tart, smart and wicked fun’, Harper’s Bazaar finds it ‘Brave, dark and screamingly funny’, add to this praise from the USA three LOL comments on Amazon.co.uk from British readers and you know why I looked forward to reading the book.

It’s a collection of 25 stories, not Short Stories, ...
...to suffer.

Possible side effects? I wonder what the title finder was thinking of, perhaps hiccups and coughing fits from excessive laughter? I can only complain of muscle ache in my jaws from excessive yawning.

Of course, it can be me who’s humorously challenged.

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Atlantic Books
224 pages
RRP 7.99 GBP


  ... more

The word ‘hilarious’ on the front cover did it, I like hilarious.

I hadn’t read anything by the author yet but I’d come across his name repeatedly , all English corners of German bookshops offer his novel ‘Running with Scissors’, from the synopsis on the back cover I know what it is about, someone seems to believe that dysfunctional families sell well here. I’m not into this topic and so I haven’t read the book.

When Possible Side Effects arrived, I read the blurbs on the back cover: a quote from the Oprah Magazine tells me that the book is ‘Tart, smart and wicked fun’, Harper’s Bazaar finds it ‘Brave, dark and screamingly funny’, add to this praise from the USA three LOL comments on Amazon.co.uk from British readers and you know why I looked forward to reading the book.

It’s a collection of 25 stories, not Short Stories, although they’re short. Puzzled? The genre Short Stories is a highly intellectual one, a perfect Short Story is well constructed, it concentrates on a decisive moment in a character’s life and by dealing with it reveals a whole life. Each word is thoroughly thought through and more is omitted than included in the text, reading between the lines is essential.

Nothing of this can be found here, the author Augusten Burroughs writes in the first person, the first person narrator’s name is Augusten Burroughs. Jonathan Safran Foer has created a protagonist with his name in Everything Is Illuminated, from what I know about the author’s life, he’s experienced himself what he makes his character experience, yet, reading the novel I feel a distance between author and protagonist, the protagonist comes over as a creation of the author’s imagination despite the same name.

Although I know nothing about Augusten Burrough’s real life, I suspect that he’s written about himself, I discern no distance at all, he’s just looked at his life, found some incidents remarkable and put them into words. What has he found remarkable? We learn that he’s gay and lives together with his boyfriend Dennis. Once they go on holiday and while eating clams he bites on a shell and half a tooth breaks off. Instead of getting millions of dollars as compensation money, he gets nothing. Brave?

We also get to know that they’ve got an elderly dog and that Augusten persuades Dennis to buy a puppy of the same breed which is difficult to housebreak but in the end is housebroken and they can’t imagine ever living without it. Tart? Once in a hotel Augusten opens a wrong door, sees a Harvard t-shirt lying on the bed and steals it. Screamingly funny? When he was young, he worked in an advertising company from whose windows he could look into Uma Thurman’s flat. This leads to a story about Augusten’s career as a Peeping Tom when he was a boy. Smart? Augusten helps a lesbian friend who can’t find a partner find one, he suggests she post an ad in the New York Times, she composes one that covers a whole page and costs 3000 $. Wicked fun?

Some topics recur, which can be due either to a slovenly editor or to the fact that Burroughs is obsessed by them. They are: his mentally ill mother and dysfunctional family, his lack of higher education, his alcohol and tobacco addiction and his flats looking like pigpens. He mentions the latter fact so often that I can’t but suspect he’s somewhat proud of his unconventional lifestyle.

Who wants to know all this? I deffo don’t! Why in the name of the muses of literature did the man write these stories down? In my opinion the events, happenings, meetings, whatever are not interesting at all, they mean nothing for people outside the author’s immediate circle of friends, have no message, aren’t told in an original way, have no literary value and are as far from being hilarious as you can possibly imagine.

In one story we learn that Augusten Burroughs discovered writing as therapy, good for him, but why did these stories ever reach a publisher and, worse, the printing press? The reason must be the aforementioned novel which made him a star and obviously there are people who think that every fart escaping a famous person is worth conserving or rather can be turned into money. In one of the stories Burroughs tells us that he was invited to tour American universities, not to read from his novel but to talk about himself - people came in droves. He must have drawn them because of his lifestyle, a now clean survivor of one bottle of whiskey and three packets of cigarettes a day is obviously an attraction.

What do we learn from all this? Never trust other people’s verdict on humour, read at least some pages of a book before you buy it, if you can’t do this because you live abroad in a country where bookshops have only a tiny selection of English books, learn to suffer.

Possible side effects? I wonder what the title finder was thinking of, perhaps hiccups and coughing fits from excessive laughter? I can only complain of muscle ache in my jaws from excessive yawning.

Of course, it can be me who’s humorously challenged.

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Atlantic Books
224 pages
RRP 7.99 GBP

 

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