A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father

#455
Title: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2009
272 pages

Considerably less playful than Burroughs's earlier memoirs, A Wolf at the Table paints a portrait of his father as an inexplicable, dangerous alcoholic. That's a pretty complete summary of the book--the rest is detail. As I was reading Burroughs's description of his family's home in Amherst, I pictured the home of some of my relatives in about the same year. It turns out that they lived pretty near each other, which confirms that Burroughs can evoke a landscape as effectively as an emotion.