A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father | 
 enlarge | Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  88 reviews
Sales Rank: 832
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312342020
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312342029
ASIN: 0312342020
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
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Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, April 2008: When I started reading A Wolf at the Table, I thought I knew what to expect. Augusten Burroughs captures intense experience with an inexplicably cool remove, imparting a stillness and purity to emotions that would likely run amok in anyone else's hands. I love this quality of his writing, and it's present in full force in this memoir of a childhood spent in thrall to a predatory and deeply unpredictable father. What I wasn't prepared for was the suspense--the dread-filled, nearly sonorous waiting for the worst to happen. An artful sort of bait-and-switch happens in the telling: Burroughs brings you to the brink of a terrible catharsis more than once, but the break in tension never comes. It is profoundly sad, remarkably tender, and fueled by a sense of love and reverence that only a child knows. --Anne Bartholomew
Product Description
“As a little boy, I had a dream that my father had taken me to the woods where there was a dead body. He buried it and told me I must never tell. It was the only thing we’d ever done together as father and son, and I promised not to tell. But unlike most dreams, the memory of this one never left me. And sometimes…I wasn’t altogether sure about one thing: was it just a dream?” When Augusten Burroughs was small, his father was a shadowy presence in his life: a form on the stairs, a cough from the basement, a silent figure smoking a cigarette in the dark. As Augusten grew older, something sinister within his father began to unfurl. Something dark and secretive that could not be named. Betrayal after shocking betrayal ensued, and Augusten’s childhood was over. The kind of father he wanted didn’t exist for him. This father was distant, aloof, uninterested… And then the “games” began. With A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs makes a quantum leap into untapped emotional terrain: the radical pendulum swing between love and hate, the unspeakably terrifying relationship between father and son. Told with scorching honesty and penetrating insight, it is a story for anyone who has ever longed for unconditional love from a parent. Though harrowing and brutal, A Wolf at the Table will ultimately leave you buoyed with the profound joy of simply being alive. It’s a memoir of stunning psychological cruelty and the redemptive power of hope.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 83 more reviews...
 Unreadable July 23, 2008
Jane Fletcher
I've read all of his books and this one is boring. I couldn't get past the first few chapters. There is little to no humor in it and it was ponderous and self pitying. His father didn't pay enough attention to him(whose father did?)and blah, blah, blah...
 Fabulous follow-up July 23, 2008
P. Voneiff (Dallas, TX)
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs is one of my favorite books and this was a good follow-up. He doesn't talk much about his father in the previous book so it was nice to get more insight. I thought it was a little dry at first but got really good as it went on. The first line in the book tied me in though!
Love the book cover July 22, 2008
Lynn Duvall (Louisville, Ky)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book didn't make me want to read more. It didn't draw me into the charaters. It was very hard to follow for me.
 Well Writen, But A Tad Misleading July 18, 2008
Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA)
I'm giving this book three stars primarily on the technical aspect of Burroughs writing. It's extremely well written, evocative, moody, and at times actually scary.For those who are familiar with his other books, this is also uncharacteristically very serious, lacking the many laughs or frankly even chuckles his other books have elicited. My problem with the book is that I kept waiting for the torrent of what I believed, and is actually foreshadowed, of violence at the hands of his father towards Augusten. Some of the incidents that he relays are awful there's no denying it, and there's no way to underestimate the feelings brought on by living with someone who was so clearly an angry alcoholic, but less so the menacing sociopath he would lead you to believe tormented him. The homicidal impulses he believes his father was capable of were merely that; feelings. And as the book progressed it seemed to become less about an abusive parent, whether physical or emotional, and more about a boy becoming a man and finding the way to put to rest the monster that had been created, and accept he might never get the love and validation he was seeking from this wolf he called "Dead".
 Dark, painful, but rewarding July 17, 2008
Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
Augusten Burroughs has written some funny books. Prominent among them is his autobiographical RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, about growing up with an older brother with Asperger Syndrome, a mother with mental illness who retreated from conflict, and a father who was an alcoholic. Burroughs managed to mine that potentially horrific set of circumstances for nuggets of skewed humor. In A WOLF AT THE TABLE, he gives up the struggle to find amusement there and tells it like it was. The result is gripping, depressing and at times truly scary.
The wolf is Burroughs's dad, a man who battled the demons of booze, demons that in the author's skilled treatment often come to terrifying life. The flawed patriarch abused his wife and children, forcing them all to exist within his life-despising mental morass. As a small child who had a right to expect a modicum of love from his parents, Burroughs simply learned to retreat and expect very little from Daddy --- no hugs, almost no touching, no walks, no talks, no kind words. His father, a college professor, sat and drank, demanding utmost quiet while he did so. The second son became an invalid who hid from the world. Incident after incident infused his young spirit with hopes, then dashed them.
One day Burroughs's father took him to the University, to his classroom. The boy, seeing some space on the blackboard, began to scribble. He informed Burroughs with a smile, "That was a bad idea." Burroughs became used to feeling a chill in the air when his father smiled: "there was nothing happy in that smile."
Burroughs begins the memoir with a scene in which he is being hunted by a ravening presence: "if my father caught me, he would cut my neck." The child in his pajamas races, blundering through the woods, trying to elude "the jabbing slash from his flashlight." Nightmare? Or fact? Later, we are told, he sees a telltale pine needle in his father's hair.
As time passes, Burroughs's brother becomes an increasing burden to the family, exhibiting wildly anti-social behavior and only occasionally acting in a sane way to try to help his younger sibling survive the horror. At one point, his method was to teach the boy how to shoot a rifle, telling him, "You have to be able to protect yourself because I won't be around."
So where was the mother in this family drama? Passive, mentally unstable, far too weak to combat her cold, often enraged husband, she was probably unfit to raise children, even in the happiest of circumstances. She married someone who was promising, a rising star among men, who was studying for the ministry. Not long after their wedding, the star fell. The man of God lost his faith, dropped out of his studies and began to worship the seductive satan of alcohol. He later developed psoriatic arthritis, which compounded his misery and his hatred of all things life-affirming and comforting to others. Over the long years of Burroughs's lost childhood, his father became paranoid and his mother the trembling prey for his fits of anger. At best, he was a control freak and she was his cowering lackey.
A few times she ran away, taking her confused son with her. For a little while there would be an unsettled peace, in a motel room, with the only parent who touched him and confided in him. Then she would be taken away, institutionalized, and return home in a zombie state, all the heavy tranquilizers still unable to suppress her need to scream occasionally. The deaths of two family dogs underscore the evil that roamed the house. One was ignored when it was clearly sick, and despite Burroughs's childish alerts, it died without succor. The other was finally put out of its misery after it turned savagely aggressive.
More than once, from an early age, Burroughs had fantasies of killing his father. But he could not, he realized, because his father hadn't whipped and tortured him --- "all he was guilty of was not wanting me."
No matter how "normal" one's childhood, there are moments when a child simply cannot comprehend the actions and thoughts that emanate from the grownup realm. Mistakes are made in the "best" of homes. This book chronicles one long, depressing, harrowing series of life-ruining mistakes. That its author pulled through is a small miracle of resilience. Burroughs sets up no signposts along this perilous route. He simply re-walks his childhood path, every harrowing step of the way, and we walk a few steps behind, putting our feet, often reluctantly, in his small footsteps.
A WOLF AT THE TABLE is being hailed as a masterpiece created by a remarkable talent, and all the praise is fully deserved. Though a difficult read, you will find something of yourself in it.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
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