Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs - It takes a certain kind of person to find the humor in tragedy. I’m one of those people. My husband simply cannot understand it when he finds me giggling maniacally as I watch a southern-Gothic Betty Butterfield tell the emergency-room doctor that the pills he’s prescribed for her Fox News-induced panic attack are not what she had in mind. “I want somethin’ with a “X” in it,” she wails.http://www.bohnsplace.com/betty_butterfield/ and http://www.mmmhellooo.com/.
If you don’t think Betty Butterfield or Augusten Burroughs are funny, then you either led a boringly normal childhood or you’re completely psychotic.
When my mother saw that I was reading Possible Side Effects, she remarked, “I don’t think that man is funny at all.” In case you’re wondering, she didn’t live a boringly normal childhood. I doubt Augusten’s mother would’ve seen the humor either.
See, me and Augusten? We’re so much alike it’s kinda scary. And it’s not just because we both have southern backgrounds rife with mental illness of the Auntie Mame variety. Or because we’re insecure, hypochondriacal slobs with a tendency to write down our lives. It’s because I get it. Oh, I sooo get it. Burroughs has this kind of Seinfeld-episode quality to his stories it that I can relate to.
When he writes a chapter about buying up as many first-edition John Updike novels as possible because the guy’s old and could die any minute, and just THINK how the value on those books will skyrocket when he does, finally, bite the dust… Well, let’s just say I understood, and brushed the dust off my two Easton Press signed Kurt Vonneguts.
And when Burroughs recounts the story about taking a weekend getaway with his partner at a private B&B only to get completely creeped out by the owner’s doll collection, I knew just how he felt.
“Standing there on the foyer, on the inch-thick maroon carpeting, I stared directly at a human baby girl doll, seated in a high chair. Behind her on a bookcase, a row of little girls, all in Victorian dressing gowns and black flats… ….All around the room, dolls. Little dolls in a display case between the windows. A doll on the sofa right next to us. Two dolls sharing a seat behind the innkeeper’s chair.” Geeze! Who could sleep with all those dolls leering at you?
Later, behind the closed door of their room, they fantasize about sneaking through the house at night, removing all the dolls’ heads, or writing things in the guestbook for the next guests to find. “She watched us,” or “There’s something about one of the dolls.” Har!
But Burroughs has something Seinfeld doesn’t have. There are stories here that break your heart. These are stories about damaged people, some who bloom in the face of tragedy and some who succumb to it, and what is to be learned there.
While Burroughs has a knack for skewering people in his life, he also shines the spotlight on himself, revealing his less-than-pretty habits and his less-than-noble intentions. It’s this unpitying self-revelation that makes me like him because I recognize so much of myself in his essays.
He’s damaged goods, that’s certain. But it’s the kind of damage that reveals the strength beneath it, even in humor, the wisdom gained through pain – his own and others’. And it makes me think that maybe I’ve got some of that strength, too. It makes me want to have him over for tea and compare mental illnesses. I’ve got some funny stories in my family, too, that I just know he’d like.
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