In a polygraphish New York profile, Sam Anderson got Augusten Burroughs to admit that he might, 5 memoirs in, be running out of life-experience to mine: “He says he might be done. He wants to go back to fiction, which he says always feels like an adventure.”
Today in the Times, Janet Maslinagrees. After kicking things off by bemoaning the fact that “book’s cover graphic packs more of a wallop than the text does,” she goes on to mock the affected, Joyce-lite musings of infant Augusten (who pines for “my crib, my homebox, my goodcage” — oy) and to wonder what, exactly, the dude’s father did that was memoir-meritously bad, besides kill a guinea pig.
“[Burroughs] remains a writer with a large and loyal following, a fluent and funny storyteller whenever he actually has stories to tell. Maybe those stories needn’t be so personal. Maybe his range can expand beyond tales of dysfunction. And maybe some thoughts belong on the page more than others do,” she concludes. Zing. Let’s hope Burroughs never gets to pie her.