Man, it's really fascinating to read a memoir of essays like this in 2018. Possible Side Effects is the fourth collection of personal essays based on his life that Augusten Burroughs published in the 2000s, and there was a period of time for five or six years when that style of writing dominated book publishing, in large part due to the success of his first memoir, Running with Scissors. I had read his first three books around the time they were published, and enjoyed all of them, but I had purchased this book back when there was still a Borders next to Penn Station.
The book is only twelve years old, and depicts events that take place in the 1970s through the mid-2000s, but it's remarkable just how dated it feels. That datedness isn't necessarily a problem; my reaction wasn't exactly 'oh this didn't age well,' but it was more an awareness of the fact that it was describing a different time, both in terms of the settings of the stories and the time in which those stories were written. I was reminded of a couple of essays in The Salmon of Doubt in which Douglas Adams described how he interacted with technology in the 1990s and how he expected technology and life to evolve as a result. It wasn't even that he was wrong about everything, but I had to grapple with just how differently the world I was a teenager was from how today is. We adapt so quickly to changes, even ones that feel (and, truly, are) monumental, and Burrough's descriptions of dating via personal ads and then craigslist postings and other methods of the trade feel simultaneously very familiar and completely foreign.
This book feels like a fourth collection of essays, which is to say that while the writing is still as inventive and compulsively readable, the stories being shared don't feel like the big jewels anymore. There's still something to be discovered in them, and I don't regret reading them as well, but I didn't really engage with them as a reader so much as I engaged with them as someone who is approximately the age now that Burroughs was when he wrote them, and that's an interesting place to be when thinking about the stories. I discovered from reading them that I still deeply care about whether the person of Augusten Burroughs is doing okay now; he's married, although not to the man who he was dating while writing this book, and he's working on a couple of projects, although nothing too major, compared to his earlier successes. But I really hope the life behind the wiki entry about him is happy.
Grade: B
The book is only twelve years old, and depicts events that take place in the 1970s through the mid-2000s, but it's remarkable just how dated it feels. That datedness isn't necessarily a problem; my reaction wasn't exactly 'oh this didn't age well,' but it was more an awareness of the fact that it was describing a different time, both in terms of the settings of the stories and the time in which those stories were written. I was reminded of a couple of essays in The Salmon of Doubt in which Douglas Adams described how he interacted with technology in the 1990s and how he expected technology and life to evolve as a result. It wasn't even that he was wrong about everything, but I had to grapple with just how differently the world I was a teenager was from how today is. We adapt so quickly to changes, even ones that feel (and, truly, are) monumental, and Burrough's descriptions of dating via personal ads and then craigslist postings and other methods of the trade feel simultaneously very familiar and completely foreign.
This book feels like a fourth collection of essays, which is to say that while the writing is still as inventive and compulsively readable, the stories being shared don't feel like the big jewels anymore. There's still something to be discovered in them, and I don't regret reading them as well, but I didn't really engage with them as a reader so much as I engaged with them as someone who is approximately the age now that Burroughs was when he wrote them, and that's an interesting place to be when thinking about the stories. I discovered from reading them that I still deeply care about whether the person of Augusten Burroughs is doing okay now; he's married, although not to the man who he was dating while writing this book, and he's working on a couple of projects, although nothing too major, compared to his earlier successes. But I really hope the life behind the wiki entry about him is happy.
Grade: B
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