# Dry: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs ## Metadata - **Author:** Augusten Burroughs - **Published:** June 2003, St. Martin's Press (about 293 pages); follows *Running with Scissors* (2002) - **Form:** Memoir of his twenties: addiction, rehab, relapse, recovery - **Audiobook:** Macmillan Audio, read by the author, about 8.5 hours - **Related:** [[Reading/Authors/Augusten Burroughs/Magical Thinking|Magical Thinking]] (his later essay collection), [[Reading/Authors/Mary Karr/The Art of Memoir|The Art of Memoir]] ## How this note was made I wrote this from published summaries and reviews, not from reading or listening to the book. Plot details come from summaries and the sources disagree slightly in places, which I note. The critique at the end is my own synthesis of those reviews and is marked as such. A Minnesota Public Radio piece on truth versus fiction in the book is linked but I couldn't load it. ## Summary *Dry* is Burroughs's account of getting sober. He is a young, successful advertising copywriter in New York who uses alcohol to get through work and a lot of social life, drinking heavily with his friend Jim, a mortician. After he turns up drunk to a client meeting, his boss and colleagues (his work partner Greer is named in summaries) give him an ultimatum: get treatment or lose the job. The book falls into two halves: 1. **Rehab.** He goes to a 30-day program in Minnesota (named as the "Proud Institute" in one summary; Wikipedia describes it as a facility serving gay patients). He arrives skeptical of the 12-step approach and of the therapy-speak around him, makes friends, notably a cynical fellow patient, Hayden, and slowly lets the process work. Reviewers agree this is the emotional high point. 2. **Early sobriety and relapse.** Back in New York, he tries to stay sober while the rest of his life pulls at him: AA meetings, a romance that comes out of the recovery world with Foster (who has his own crack problem), and his former lover and friend Pighead, who is dying of AIDS-related illness. Hayden moves away (to London, in one summary). Burroughs avoids Pighead out of fear and emotional shutdown. **Spoiler:** Pighead's death breaks his resolve. He relapses on alcohol and begins using crack with Foster; the binge lasts about a year and nearly kills him. He comes back through a gift left after Pighead's death, a golden pig figurine engraved with a command to stop drinking, and returns to AA. By the end, a year on, he and Jim are both sober. **Disclaimer.** The book opens with the standard memoirist's warning: names changed, characters combined, events compressed, some episodes "re-creations." (Wikipedia) ## Reception - **BookPage (starred review):** positive; his wit and candor lift a familiar recovery narrative "a cut above" the genre, and avoid preachy self-help sentiment. [Read](https://bookpage.com/?p=111713) - **PopMatters:** positive; more emotional substance than *Running with Scissors*, with Pighead singled out as a rich secondary character. Notes that recovery doesn't erase his personality: you can stop drinking and stay funny and a little crazy. [Read](https://popmatters.com/dry-a-memoir-2496245954.html) - **The A.V. Club:** mixed. Honest but less compelling than *Running with Scissors*; the more conventional approach reads a bit like a TV movie about alcoholism, and the book loses momentum after the rehab section, though the idea of recovery as a "second career" of daily work lands. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/augusten-burroughs-dry-a-memoir-1798198640) - **New York Journal of Books:** favorable despite familiar territory; praises the wit, but finds the narrator unsympathetic and the tone odd at times. [Read](https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/dry-memoir) ## Critique *This section is my own synthesis from the reviews above, not a review from reading the book.* **What works (consistent across reviewers)** - **The rehab half.** Every review treats the treatment-center chapters as the strongest part: a cynic's comic voice meeting real psychological breakthroughs without turning sentimental. - **A funny voice that keeps its edge.** The point reviewers draw from the book, that sobriety doesn't remove personality, is also a craft choice: he keeps the same acerbic narrator rather than switching to earnest recovery language. - **Pighead.** The supporting characters, Pighead especially, give the memoir a weight that a pure addiction arc would lack, and his death gives the relapse a cause the reader can feel. **Reservations** - **Pacing after rehab.** The A.V. Club's complaint is the most specific: once the setting shifts from the facility to ordinary sober life, the energy drops. That is a structural risk of any recovery memoir, where the dramatic setting is also the most artificial one. - **Familiar shape.** The arc (denial, intervention, rehab, relapse, bottom, return) is the standard recovery-memoir pattern, and the reviews suggest the voice is doing the work that the structure doesn't. - **An unsympathetic narrator.** One review flags this; it is a trade-off of the honesty. Whether it works depends on whether the humor earns the reader's patience. - **How "true" is it.** In 2005 the Turcotte family sued Burroughs over *Running with Scissors*, alleging many incidents were invented, and he later added a note to another book (*Possible Side Effects*) admitting some events were "expanded and changed." *Dry* carries its own compressed-events disclaimer. None of that shows what is or isn't accurate in *Dry*, but it shapes how to read a book that presents itself as memoir. In Karr's terms, this is the truth contract under strain; see her chapters on the truth contract and on exaggeration in [[Reading/Authors/Mary Karr/The Art of Memoir|The Art of Memoir]]. The MPR piece [Truth vs. Fiction in Augusten Burroughs' memoir, "Dry"](http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2003/11/03_newsroom_dry/) looks directly at this (not read). **Questions to check while listening** 1. Does the comic voice survive Pighead's death, or does the tone change and does that help? 2. How much does the post-rehab section drag, as the A.V. Club says? 3. Where do you suspect compression or invention, and does the disclaimer cover it? 4. How does his narration compare to the way he reads *Magical Thinking*? ## Sources [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_(memoir)) · [SuperSummary](https://www.supersummary.com/dry-burroughs/summary/) · [BookPage](https://bookpage.com/?p=111713) · [PopMatters](https://popmatters.com/dry-a-memoir-2496245954.html) · [A.V. Club](https://www.avclub.com/augusten-burroughs-dry-a-memoir-1798198640) · [NY Journal of Books](https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/dry-memoir) · [Audiobook catalog record](https://catalog.deerfieldlibrary.org/Hoopla/11801396) · [Encyclopedia.com (lawsuit background)](https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/burroughs-augusten-1965-0) ## My notes