Title: Dry
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Pages: 293 pages
Audio: 12 hours 30 min
Inside cover blurb: From the bestselling author of
Running with Scissors comes
Dry the hilarious, moving, and no less bizarre account of what happened next.
You may not know it, but you've met Augusten Burroughs. You've seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twenty-something guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by having twelve; when the ordinary person went home at midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting ties, automated wake-up calls, and cologne on the tongue could only hide so much for so long. At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten landed in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey, Jr., are immediately dashed by the grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. But when Augusten is forced to examine himself, something actually starts to click, and that's when he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life and live it sober. What follows is a memoir that's as moving as it is funny, as heartbreaking as it is real.
Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a higher power.
My take: I really like Augusten Burroughs, I think there is only one book of his that I wasn't too keen on. He is funny and honest. This book is no different from his other works. Read this book, read his other books as well.
This excellent book covers the mental illnesses and/or personality disorders of 12 very famous people: Marilyn Monroe (borderline personality disorder), Howard Hughes (obsessive-compulsive disorder), Andy Warhol (hoarding), Princess Diana (bulimia), Abraham Lincoln (depression), Christine Jorgenson (transgender), Frank Lloyd Wright (narcissism), Betty Ford (alcoholism/drug addiction), Charles Darwin (anxiety), George Gershwin (hyperactivity), Fyodor Dostoevsky (gambling addiction), and Albert Einstein (Asperger's syndrome). I love personality theory and found this book to be extremely engrossing and accessible with many sources and notes listed for each person, some of which I can't wait to read for a deeper understanding. The author is not making diagnoses on her own (she's a journalist and editor) but used these many sources to paint a fascinating and usually compassionate portrait of these well known people. I found all except the final two figures and their diagnoses to be engrossing, probably because I don't find gambling addiction and Asperger's syndrome to be all that interesting. However, the fact that all of these people made great contributions to society while trying to deal with sometimes debilitating problems makes their accomplishments all the more remarkable. (Except for Frank Lloyd Wright - he was just a huge jerk to everyone around him and probably could have achieved even more if not for his extreme narcissism.) 320 pages.
