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    Dry: A Memoir
    Dry: A Memoir
    Dry: A Memoir
    Audiobook8 hours

    Dry: A Memoir

    Written by Augusten Burroughs

    Narrated by Augusten Burroughs

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the New York Times Bestselling author of Running With Scissors comes the story of one man trying to out-drink his memories, outlast his demons, and outrun his past.

    "I was addicted to "Bewitched" as a kid. I worshipped Darren Stevens the First. When he'd come home from work and Samantha would say, ‘Darren, would you like me to fix you a drink?' He'd always rest his briefcase on the table below the mirror in the foyer, wipe his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief and say, ‘Better make it a double.'" (from Chapter Two)

    You may not know it, but you've met Augusten Burroughs. You've seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twentysomething guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by having twelve; when the ordinary person went home at midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting ties, automated wake-up calls and cologne on the tongue could only hide so much for so long. At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. But when Augusten is forced to examine himself, something actually starts to click and that's when he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life—and live it sober. What follows is a memoir that's as moving as it is funny, as heartbreaking as it is true. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateJun 1, 2003
    ISBN9781593973162
    Author

    Augusten Burroughs

    Augusten Burroughs is the author of Running with Scissors, Dry, Magical Thinking: True Stories, Possible Side Effects, A Wolf at the Table and You Better Not Cry. He is also the author of the novel Sellevision, which has been optioned for film. The film version of Running with Scissors, directed by Ryan Murphy and produced by Brad Pitt, was released in October 2006 and starred Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Annette Bening (nominated for a Golden Globe for her role), Alec Baldwin and Evan Rachel Wood. Augusten's writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers around the world including The New York Times and New York Magazine. In 2005 Entertainment Weekly named him one of "The 25 Funniest People in America." He resides in New York City and Western Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Dry

    4/5

    1,755 ratings70 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book captures some of the realities of addiction and recovery without being melodramatic or self-congratulatory. Burroughs manages to poke fun at "the program" and also acknowledge its hard-to-understand power. He is snarky...and also humble. It's funny and touching (and is not cliche, like that description I just offered). Recovery, Burroughs finds, is not easy. But it's possible. And it's worth it. Thanks, Pighead* (*a character in the book, not a slam on the author).

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This was one of those books I just couldn’t put down. I finished it in a few days and was sad when it was over! Great writing, dark and witty and funny. Loved it!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is a great read! It will make you laugh, cry and pull you in the whole way through.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I didn’t find it to be his best work. I was glad when it was over
    • 5/5
      there's a part in 'trainspotting' where the heroin junkie reminds the viewer that all of the "just say no" campaigns fail to mention whey they're addicts in the first place: becase it feels good. burroughs chronicles his soulless life as an ad exec and his escapes into the bottle on both sides of that equation. you're there equally when the high life is a fun time, and for the horrible bottomings-out. chock full of places where you're laughing your ass off, half of which making you wonder if it's really ok to laugh at this, and deeply emotional without being cheezy. highly recommended to anyone who's ever lived with an addict.
    • 3/5
      I've torn through several alcoholic memoirs recently and while this one is entertaining and revelatory in spots it seems to drag more than others. For Damaged Gay Memoirists, David Sedaris is the better bet for consistent entertainment.
    • 5/5
      Very real. Reminds me of various people I've met, melted down into one Gay Man in NYC. Going through pure hell + entering recovery. A hope "read"- may many active alcoholics and addicts listen deeply + drink of this wisdom.
    • 4/5
      Great book for when you feel like your own life is wreck and you need someone else to be a wreck with you.
    • 1/5
      Required reading for a workshop. Not my idea of fun.
    • 5/5
      As someone who has been sober for over five years now, this book hits very close to home. He does a great job of sprinkling comedy and hope into the despair that is addiction. I laughed, cried, and often thought to myself “I know, right?” This is a great listen and I highly recommend it to anyone who is struggling/recovering or anyone who loves someone that is.
    • 4/5
      Despite the subject, a very entertaining read
    • 2/5
      It just couldn’t hold my attention for long enough. Not enough substance.
    • 4/5
      After escaping the surreal hell that was his childhood, Augusten arrives in New York, generates a career in advertising and develops a drinking problem. Things come to a head when his boss gives him an ultimatum: attend rehab or look for another job. Skeptical and defensive, rehab eventually gets through to him and he comes to view his problems realistically. The rest of the book deals with his foray into sobriety and the issues he must work through to guarantee full recovery. Intimate, dark, and funny.
    • 4/5
      Not as funny or as compelling as Running With Scissors, but still decent. On the other hand, it's definitely a more mature read. Somewhat sad ending.
    • 4/5
      Loved this book. I cried like a baby when Pighead died.
    • 4/5
      Not sure how a memoir could be both intoxicating and sobering at the same time, but Burroughs manages to pull it off with Dry. It's less psychedelically implausible and more realistic than Running with Scissors, but it is just as hysterical and touching. Burroughs knows how to write a sentence and tell a tale. It would be easy for him to glamorize his alcoholism, or turn this into a self-pitying confessional. Instead, he is able to detach his authorial perspective from the rest of himself and write about his struggles with sobriety, relationships, and reality with withering insight.
    • 4/5
      Follows Augusten through this travails in alcoholism and recovery. He has a high paying job in advertising but is forced into rehab by his boss. It's either go to rehab or lose the job. We follow him through rehab and then into sober living. He pokes fun of both rehab and the system. He states that he despises AA meeting but we find him attending them again/still at the end of the book. Was sometimes funny, but more often than not was very emotionally trying. Seems to be a very good insight into someone struggling with alcoholism and trying to recover.
    • 4/5
      Holy shit, how am I going to review this? I guess the first thing you need to know is this: I am recovering alcoholic. Dry is the story of an active alcoholic who becomes a recovering alcoholic and then an active alcoholic and then a recovering alcoholic, etc. etc. It's a memoir, these things are true, and boy did I have a lot of feelings about it.In fact, I don't know that I've ever flagged as many passages in a book as I did in Dry. No, wait, that's not true - I think I used about five hundred in that book about potatoes that was one of the vilest things I've ever read. Still! So many fucking flags!First, I should say that the writing is good. I like my memoirs written pretty novel-like, you know, with dialog and such, and Burroughs does that well. The story is fast paced, the characters are fleshed out and complex and very real. You'd think that characters who are literally real would generally translate to "real" on the page but it's harder than you may think. Burroughs does it well.I identified with so much in this book:His inability to separate himself from his drinking. "The thing is, I know I drink too much, or what other people consider too much. But it's so much a part of me, it's like saying my arms are too long. Like I can change that?"His feelings in early sobriety that he'll just get sober for a little bit and then all will be well. "Now I'm thinking rehab could turn out to be great. I'll dry out for thirty days and it'll be like going to a spa. When I come home, I'll be able to drink more like a normal person drinks."The way he compartmentializes his life. "I also can't ever have any of my friends meet each other. I have to keep them all separate. And they all think this is a little strange, but for some reason it's normal to me."His attempts to convince himself that since he's not as bad as 'those people', he can't be a 'real alcoholic.' "I would never drink cologne and therefore am not an 'alcoholic' and am, in fact, in the wrong place. This is clearly the place for the die-hard, cologne-drinking alcoholics. Not the global-brand-meeting-misser alcoholics, like me."His (incorrect) assumptions of what Alcoholics Anonymous would be like. "I'm afraid what I see in my head might be close to the truth: Held downstairs in the dank, unused basements of churches, I envision a shamed group of people wearing long dark coats and old Foster Grant sunglasses, sitting in folding metal chairs. Everyone is clutching a white Styrofoam cup filled halfway with bad coffee. Filled only halfway so the coffee doesn't slosh out, due to the fact that everyone's hands are trembling from withdrawal."How completely baffled he is with his drinking. How it makes no sense to him. A good example of this takes place when he returns home from rehab and sees bottles lined up all over his apartment. "My apartment is my secret. It's filled with empty liquor bottles. Not five of six. More like three hundred. Three hundred one-liter bottles of scotch, occupying all floor space not already occupied by a bed or a chair. Sometimes I myself am stunned by the visual presentation. And the truly odd part is that I really don't know how they got there. You'd think I'd have taken each bottle down to the trash room when it was empty. But I let two collect. And because two is nothing, I let three collect. And on it went. The ironic thing is that I'm not the kind of person who saves things."The fact that he had to learn how to understand emotions. This was true for me. I could tell you if I felt good or bad, but in early sobriety there was no additional nuance to my feelings. Was I angry or scared? No idea! In Dry, Burroughs discusses how his rehab folks dealt with this issue. "It was illustrated with about twenty different faces, drawn with simple black lines and displaying an emotion. Under each face was a caption. Happy. Sad. Jealous. Angry. Confused. Afraid. 'When you're wondering what it is you're feeling at any given moment, simply pull out this chart and find the face that fits your mood.' So it's basically an alcoholic-to-normal dictionary. I found myself carrying the thing folded up in the front pocket of my jeans and referring to it constantly, trying to decide what I was feeling."Eventually he begins to really embrace AA and be grateful for it. Once again, something I can relate to. "I feel bathed in safety. I feel like I have this secret place I can go and say anything in the world, about anything I feel, and it's okay. And this makes me feel grateful to be an alcoholic."He does an excellent job describing the frustration of trying to talk to non-alcoholic people about alcoholism, like when his friend says, "Yeah, but beer isn't alcohol. It's just . . . beer. I mean, right? That's right, isn't it?"One of the hardest things for me was grieving the loss of alcohol. Even though it was literally killing me, even though it was destroying everything in my life, even though I no longer even wanted to drink, I grieved the loss of it. Burroughs writes, "I miss alcohol. Like it's a person. I feel abandoned. Or rather like I've walked out of a violent, abusive relationship and want to go back because in retrospect, it wasn't really all that violent or abusive."The emptiness that alcoholism creates in us. "'Nothing is enough, nothing is ever enough. It's like there's this pit inside me that can't be filled, no matter what. I'm defective.' 'You're not defective. You're an alcoholic,' he says, as if this neatly explains everything. Which, of course, it does."Early sobriety is hard. It's hard to explain just how hard it is - and not just for the reasons people think of. Yes, not picking up a drink is hard, but learning how to live is hard. The mood swings are ridiculous. Burroughs describes an experience in early sobriety very well, "It's Saturday, noon, and I've been chain-smoking and drinking coffee alcoholically since seven this morning. I've had two pots. I feel electrified, like I've been blow-drying my hair in the bathtub. I'm completely manic - singing along loudly to the radio, but to different songs than they're playing. I'm like somebody who has just decided to stop taking important psychoactive medication. I'm so crazy this morning that Hayden couldn't stand being around me and went out for a walk," and later that chapter, "I hate having feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings? One minute I feel excited, the next I feel terrified. One minute I feel doomed and the next I feel free. I think about lobotomies."
    • 5/5
      At the age of twenty-four, Augusten Burroughs has a lucrative career as a New York City ad man. He also has a serious alcohol problem--and hundreds of empty scotch bottles in his apartment to prove it. Dry is Burroughs' memoir of his youthful struggle with alcoholism, including his stay at a gay-friendly rehab and endless AA meetings in dreary church basements. His addiction is exacerbated by the stress of his job and his conflicted relationships with lovers and friends. But despite the heavy subject matter, this book is very entertaining. Burrough's biting wit and lack of self-pity save the narrative from mawkishness, even when he writes about losing a former lover to AIDS.I really enjoyed this book; so much so that I could hardly put it down. I highly recommend it.
    • 4/5
      In Dry, Augusten Burroughs recounts how he is forced into to rehab or will lose his job and how this experience opens his eyes to his alcoholism. The book continues on to describe his recovery efforts as he faces some heavy emotional personal hurdles. This second memoir from Burroughs jumps ahead in time from the ending of his previous book Running with Scissors, picking up in the middle of his advertising career, which manages to be successful and lucrative despite his burgeoning alcohol problem. It's not necessary to read his first book to jump right in to this one, but I think it helps to know his background to both understand how Burroughs got to this point in his life and to sympathize with him even when he's at his worse. There are a couple moments here and there where Burroughs does touch on a few "highlights" of his abusive, dysfunctional childhood, which serve to provide the necessary context for this moment in his life.Once again, I found Burroughs's work to be compelling, not just for its plot but because Burroughs's writing style flows so easily. He is concise and to the point, but his writing isn't simplistically dull. Burroughs peppers the book with interesting metaphors, colorful allusions, dark humor, and moments of insightful clarity. I haven't read much by the way of recovery memoirs, so this book's thematic content was new to me and provided much by the way of food for thought. While not overly emotional in his telling, Burroughs's story is nevertheless one of emotional highs and lows as it takes its readers along the path of his rehab, recovery, relapse, and further recovery.
    • 2/5
      This book wasn't nearly as good as his first. The humor is lacking and his adult life story, although entertaining, was sad but without the dark and biting humor of his first memoir. I would recommend it only for those who have read the first book and want to find out how he ended up, which was also a bit disappointing. Overall, the writing style is lacking in quality and the story is one that can't add up to his other work. He is no David Sedaris!
    • 4/5
      Wow. Burroughs' life is...messed up. This is the story of his...addiction to alcohol (et al), how he went to rehab, and how he relapsed...but then got back on track.

      I must say, this is a book that kept me wanting to read more and more. Burroughs's life is one I am sad that anyone has had to live. And yet, what I think is the most appealing about his stories is that he is not welled up in depression. He is frank and open about his feelings...and despite his faults (shallowness, alcoholism), I can't help but root him on. I want him to succeed, and I was crushed when he relapsed.


      A good read, for sure.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. The ending is heart wrenching for sure. I would give this book 4 1/2 stars if Goodreads allowed it.He has a great writing style and is a king at similes.
    • 4/5
      I always tell myself don't start anything by Augusten Burroughs when you have some place to be. Yep, forgot about lunch and my afternoon plans to knock this one out.
    • 5/5
      A fantastic, funny and sad book that held you from the beginning to end. Burroughs is good at portraying himself as humorously intellectual, socially stunted, and otherwise a genuine soul. Touching. I couldn't wait to see how it ended, while not wanting it to end.
    • 4/5
      Dry indeed, as well as witty, gritty and real. Burroughs, an ad man, unsparingly chronicles his descent into alcoholism and his unlikely redemption. Funny, sad, and very good.
    • 4/5
      Augusten recounts his battle with alcoholism and attempt to work the program. Despite his sometime arrogance, I can't help but like Augusten. You root for him the whole way through the book. I think that I rooted more for him and Pighead than anything, but a great read.
    • 4/5
      This is Burroughs's memoir of getting sober, of giving up alcohol and learning to live with alcoholism. Treatment comes to Burroughs when he is given an ultimatum- go to treatment or lose his job. And the job is a significant source of the addiction. Burroughs worked in advertising, an industry that he portrays as high-ego, high-stress, alcohol-soaked, and drug-addicted. As with anyone else, Burroughs finds sobriety to be a difficult process. His efforts to stay dry are complicated by the fact that one of his close friends is dying, and one of his more obnoxious colleagues continues to try and tempt him to drink. The book offers a gritty look at the day-to-day process of sobriety. This is not a book about rehab, it's a book about what happens after rehab. There's definitely suspense laced throughout this book- will Augusten fall off the wagon or won't he? This book also offers a rather interesting look at the over-the-top world of New York advertising. If you didn't already find advertising loathsome, you probably will after reading this book.
    • 5/5
      Frightening, traumatic, moving, humorous and for one who has been there, a stark reminder. The bset book this year by far.
    • 4/5
      I've found that this author's memoirs have real staying power. I believe it's because he writes with such immediacy, the reader is right there with him both when he has his epiphanies and when he has his setbacks.