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Escape hatch

Between my husband getting laid off last week (with all of three weeks’ severance – Jesus God what are we going to do?), his aunt dying yesterday, and an increased severity of political disillusionment on my part, I’m not much inclined to blog right now.

Fortunately, my favorite living author, Augusten Burroughs, has a new book out: A Wolf at the Table. I’m debating between devouring it whole (as I was starting to do this morning; see below) and savoring it for as long as possible. Or perhaps both. (Devour, then start over. Lather, rinse, repeat.)

If I'm quiet for awhile, this will partly explain why

In any event, I now have a place in which to engage my consciousness that doesn’t make me want to scream bloody murder. Or it does, but in a productive, Jesus-what’s-wrong-with-me-I-need-to-be-writing-like-this way. Augusten Burroughs is nothing if not an existential shot of courage, an escape hatch that isn’t such a benign “escape” after all (considering some of my own history that requires a fair amount of confronting; Augusten’s most recent book, notably, concerns his father).

Meantime, you can (almost) always find me on Twitter.

Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Tuesday, April 29, 2008, at 6:46 pm by Victoria Marinelli. Filed in Images, Process, Sources and tagged .
  • please let me know what you think of this book. i almost picked it up, but for some reason hesitated. i am actually reading "look me in the eye" by john elder robinson who is his older brother, who writes about their father too. i am afraid of getting "burroughs" overload. robinson's book is more specifically about growing up with asperger's syndrome and how his family dealt (or not dealt) with it.
  • Funny, I have his brother's book too - but stopped about 50 pages in. It was absolutely compelling but I felt like I wanted to reread AB's earlier books first for perspective. (Then a bunch of shit hit the fan and I ended up neither rereading AB's stuff or finishing Robison's book.)

    Now, oddly enough, I'm about the same number of pages into AB's latest and I'm frozen in place. Partly because, again, there's been a huge amount of stuff happening (funeral today for instance), but also partly because I'm afraid of what may be revealed. It's all projection, of course - there's stuff I haven't written about myself that I desperately need to (or I've written about it but not in the way it ought to have been written).

    What is quite interesting is the extent to which the early material in A Wolf at the Table really humanizes AB's mother. The fact that the earlier books (narrating points in time later than I'm reading about now) represent her more as a monster wasn't, I think, a distortion; rather, by that point in time, she'd simply dissolved so much that she was incapable of making (or was unwilling to make) rational, caring choices with regard to raising (if you could even call it that - "raising") her son. (And what monster wasn't, at some point, an innocent?)

    So I'm enthralled by both books but kind of petrified too. I think in the coming weeks I'll have more room to take in the material. I also have another reason to go back to Robison's book - my recently deceased aunt Barb leaves behind a husband who is not in spectacular health himself, and a severely autistic and developmentally disabled daughter. The time may come when my husband and I end up caring for her. To be honest, the prospect scares the crap out of me - I'm so out of my depth with the issue of autism and related disorders I don't know where to begin. Of course given the severity of our cousin's impairment, I don't expect there will be much that is directly analogous to (the quite highly functioning) Robison's experience, but on matters of (to me) recognizable emotional expression, there's a lot I need to start working hard to wrap my head around.
  • "look me in the eye" is my bathroom read, which means i can only read it in little 10-15 chunks. no lingering around unless i want my bf to bang on the door yelling to see if i'm done. i think it's interesting to see both authors' versions of their shared history. sometimes, it reminds me of how when i read my twin brother's old blog that i am surprised by something he writes about a shared event in our past. i'd be like--i don't remember it quite that way--but it's nevertheless true for him.

    you've convinced me, i am buying the book this weekend while it's 30% at borders...
  • Indeed, you remain one of my favorite reasons to tweet. Hang in there.
  • You too. And I'm trying to... thanks.
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