Reviewed by Joanna Pearson
7.5.07

Like a televangelist, a truly funny person can get away with talking about nothing substantial for long intervals before others realize it. And even then, if that person is charismatic enough, the converted still don’t mind. Such is the magic and wit of Augusten Burroughs. Yes, you already read about his crazy childhood in Running with Scissors, his battle with alcoholism in Dry, and his varied thoughts and anecdotes in Magical Thinking—but now he returns with more anecdotes in his fourth nonfiction effort, Possible Side Effects. Burroughs’ autobiographical well does not run dry—or does it?

Possible Side Effects finds Burroughs as a well-regarded writer who lives with a committed partner and two adored dogs—not quite the same riveting raw material as out-of-control alcoholism or a bipolar mother, but he makes do. Taking a scattershot approach, he jumps from remembrances of being a little boy terrified of the Tooth Fairy to a recent book tour trip to London. It’s a disorienting, asymmetric, mostly hilarious ride; sort of the B-side tidbits left over from Magical Thinking, but too good to throw away.

With his perfectly calibrated mix of deadpan self-effacement and misanthropy, Burroughs assembles these stories from his recent and not-so-recent past. Here, he describes his misbegotten desire to be a police officer:

So I had to ask myself, what was my motivation for becoming a cop? and the answer was to say I was a cop…I smiled when I imagined myself being the ultimate party pooper, arresting kids on the NYU campus for smoking a joint. And then pocketing the joint for myself, for later.

Burroughs then proceeds to recount a brief stint working store security and his inability to confront shoplifters, particularly the desperate-looking ones. Instead of confronting them, he goes out of his way to distract his fellow security guard from noticing them. This is the essence of Burroughs—his unabashed tendency to voice our own worst impulses, punctuated by surprising bursts of empathy.

Thus the collection offers an off-kilter but compelling moral code; a code further exemplified by the essay about Burrough’s friend Debby, or “Druggy Debby” as he calls her. He and Debby concoct an elaborate system of blown-up images of disturbing, hard-core pornography coupled with safety messages like, “Do not pass in the right hand lane!” which they flash at bad drivers. Or there’s the woman on whom Burroughs spies from his apartment and his feelings of peeping-Tom-inspired protectiveness towards her, his urge to intervene and break her up from her (in his opinion) bad boyfriend. And, in what is perhaps one of the best essays in the entire book, Burroughs writes about going for treatment as a child with a dermatologist who is herself disfigured by a burn, and falling in love with her scarred face.

Possible Side Effects is most interesting when Burroughs is telling the stories of low points in his life—such as a personal ad date who talks openly of his constipation and his quest to be a whirling dervish. Few writers can simultaneously be so wickedly judgmental and yet understanding the very people they mock. This is part of what made Running with Scissors so delicious and compelling.

Yet in Possible Side Effects it is hard to suppress the nagging sense that Burroughs actually is running out of things to talk about. His essay about his trip to London for a book tour, for instance, is an incohesive ramble: he has a nosebleed on the plane (embarrassing!), buys some junk food, watches British TV, buys more junk food… Maybe this essay is itself a possible side effect of the fame that comes from telling your life story and then being lavished with praise. And then telling more. And telling more. At some point, you reel in your past and catch up with your modern-day self— and there you are, with nothing left to write about but nosebleeds and your zany pet dog.

Still, if ever there were ever a Rumpelstiltskin of the personal essay, it’s certainly Augusten Burroughs (along with the-almost-too-obvious-to-make-the-comparison David Sedaris), and he manages, for the most part, to spin fairly inconsequential straw into gold with this recent essay collection. It’s hard to want Burroughs—so charming and bittersweet funny—to stop talking, even when he’s talking about nothing at all.