something about "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs

I was underwhelmed by Running With Scissors, his much-ballyhooed memoir and debut, but I still tried Dry, another autobiographical work by American writer Augusten Burroughs. Supposedly Dry was written first. I stopped reading it about halfway though.
 
I enjoyed parts of Running With Scissors and understood it to be a memoir when I picked it up. But as I read, I grew deeply skeptical about its truthfulness and quickly learned after reading that the people depicted in the book also disputed the accounts. This soured me.
 
Dry includes in the beginning this author’s note:

This memoir is based on my experiences over a ten-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events.

So the story is no memoir. And I guess Burroughs's lawyers were also skeptical of this recovery tale and wanted to head off more lawsuits.

Besides this, the story is repetitive, and the prose did not alleviate my frustration.

Dry supposedly describes the author's battle with alcoholism. In the story, Burroughs is a fairly successful advertising copywriter but gets hammered frequently and eventually his colleagues and boss decide to stop giving him a pass.
 
He goes to rehab, gets out in 30 days, and resumes life somehow, succeeding against his urges. Totally real.

something about Raymond Carver's short stories

In the Raymond Carver collection Fires (which I have not read), he supposedly says of his short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes” that he did not know when he started writing that the protagonist was going to be a writer. He had the sentence, “The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner,” and, from there, “I made the story just as I’d made a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write.”

 

Put Yourself in My Shoes touches on the themes of the writing process and perceptions of writers and writing.

The writer and protagonist in the story is Myers (last name), and the story begins when Myers’s wife (possibly his estranged wife) Paula calls from an office Christmas party to invite him. But Myers is reluctant; he quit his job at that office—a textbook publishing company—to become a writer. During this conversation, Paula says a former coworker, Carl, admires Myers’s “nerve” for quitting the job in order to be a writer. And Carl says, ribbingly, that Myers should come to the party—“Get him out of his ivory tower and back into the real world for a while.” Myers refuses to go to the party.

 

Instead, Myers and Paula visit a couple they barely know, Edgar and Hilda Morgan. The Morgans, upon remembering that Myers is a writer, feed him some story ideas, commenting on the possible perspectives and significance of each story, all the while making comments about writing, including

• “It would take a Tolstoy to tell it and tell it right," Edgar said. "No less than a Tolstoy."
  

• "We want you to hear about Mrs. Attenborough, poor Mrs. Attenborough. You might appreciate this story, too, Mrs. Myers. This is your chance to see how his mind goes to work on raw material."

• "You know writers," Hilda said to Paula. "They like to exaggerate."
  "The power of the pen and all that," Edgar said.
  "That's it," Hilda said. "Bend your pen into a plowshare, Mr. Myers."
  

• "If you were a real writer, as you say you are, Mr. Myers, you wouldn't laugh," Edgar said as he got to his feet. "You wouldn't dare laugh! You'd try to understand. You'd plumb the depths of that poor soul's heart and try to understand. But you're no writer, sir!"

But Myers appears not to want to hear them talk about writing and repeatedly gets up to leave, telling Paula to get her coat.
 

Earlier in the story, as Myers is driving to meet Paula, we learn Myers is “between stories”:

As he drove he looked at the people who hurried along the walks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.

Although he is not writing, he is not looking for story ideas; he seems instead to be paying attention to points of form. And as the story ends and Myers and Paula are driving away from the Morgans, and Paula comments on how crazy the Morgans are, we hear again about Myers's attention:

He didn't answer. Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance. He kept driving. Snow rushed at the windshield. He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.

So without hunting for plots, Myers finds himself at the end of a story that seemed to unfold one sentence at a time.

 

The other characters in the story seem to think of writing as highfalutin, which repels Myers. But I do not think this story is necessarily a comment on What people get wrong about writing or on What writing is. I think the character—and maybe Carver himself at the time—is not writing, feels bad about it, is frustrated by people talking about writing, and then finds himself inspired. Even after stumbling on the inspiration, he still will have to write, to get it on paper, and to revise and revise again.  

 

Put Yourself in My Shoes is one of the great stories in the 37 included in Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. I know I read Cathedral in high school or college, and I remember liking it a lot. How could I have gone this long without reading his other stories? My favorite stories are "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Feathers," "Whoever Was Using This Bed," and "Blackbird Pie." I love the writing style and the mix of weight and ordinariness. I especially love the humor. “Put Yourself in My Shoes” is a great example. So is "Blackbird Pie," which is about a delusional guy's thoughts after his wife leaves him. He imagines that the Dear John letter she left him was actually written by someone else, and one of his rationalizations is a formatting choice in the handwritten letter:

Secondly, my wife never underlined her words for emphasis. Never. I don’t recall a single instance of her doing this—not once in our entire married life, not to mention the letters I received from her before we were married. It would be reasonable enough, I supposed, to point out that it could happen to anyone. That is, anyone could find himself in a situation that is completely atypical and, given the pressure of the moment, do something totally out of character and draw a line, the merest line, under a word, or maybe under an entire sentence.

Amazing. And where it goes from there:

I would go so far as to say that every word of this entire letter, so-called (though I haven't read it through in its entirety, and won't, since I can't find it now), is utterly false. I don't mean false in the sense of "untrue," necessarily. There is some truth, perhaps, to the charges. I don't want to quibble. I don't want to appear small in this matter; things are bad enough already in this department. No.

Note: I am so glad I have now read some Raymond Carver and most or all of Richard Yates. How did I go so long without really enjoying such writing happened?

creative writing exercise 7H

A fucked-up 14-year-old skates in the church parking lot and says to you, "This is how we pass the time in the evenings." You feel hard-focus, ready to toss away a talent to organize groups, and walk away, seeing people watch you and whisper in passing, "This is happening constantly."

Her plush old van looks crazy in front of my house even though neighbors know bad. She is high and says she has acid. We are older now. She wants to take me to the playground, and I say, “This is perfect.” Her dad had just said, “I know with me you feel less alone, but now you’re going to have to be on your own.” She told him, “You don’t look sleek. You lack style. You look weak.” Then she tells me, “I know what you need. And where to get it. And what it costs.” She says the night will go up in stoges and to start counting.

a joke

The police offered to take me to the detox center, but I, of course, refused. Why would I even go? So instead I walked to the library, and this lady followed me. I knew she hated me, so I stayed away from her. She gave me the middle finger from across the street even though I didn't do anything. Later she emailed me a picture of herself having sex with three guys and she wrote a description about it all in the email to me. I did not know what to feel. Then I saw one of the guys in her picture sitting in his Mazda3 in the Safeway parking lot looking at his phone and shouting at it super-hard. We all heard it. She must have sent him one of the pictures with me in it.

 

something about John Updike's book "Rabbit, Run"

He is young, but desperation already has set in.

 

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is 26 years old and, with a tumbledown marriage and unserious, demeaning sales job, faces the deeply disturbing possibility that he peaked in high school. Rabbit was a star basketball player—a natural, at home and in control on the court. High-school Rabbit never could have imagined such a sorry life awaited him after graduation.

A few pages into Rabbit, Run, Rabbit runs from his problems, including his pregnant wife, Janice. He finds his old basketball coach; but coach, too, is unmoored these days, and scandalized.

Coach finds Rabbit a prostitute named Ruth. Ruth and Rabbit spar but seem to enjoy being together. That sours, too, and soon, at the urging of a lonely local priest, Rabbit returns to reconcile with Janice, who just gave birth to their second child. But Rabbit himself is a child still, and a monstrous one, who spoils the fragile peace at home and runs back to Ruth. That goes bad. And back at home, the new baby drowns in the bathtub as a distraught Janice binge-drinks.

John Updike was 28 when he published Rabbit, Run, his second novel. He was noticing, he thought, a lot of guys who seemed to peak in high school, so Updike wrote about that and, for his efforts, won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a reputation as a premier American writer. Updike wrote several sequels to Rabbit, Run; many critics consider this series Updike’s most important work.

This was only the second Updike novel I have read, the first being 1965’s Of the Farm. Unlike the elegant prose in Of the Farm, the writing style in Rabbit, Run borders on stream-of-consciousness—lots of rich imagery and detail relayed in flowing, haphazardly punctuated sentences filling page-long paragraphs. And this surprised and put me off a little because my concept of Updike is of a polished Northeastern intellectual, a writer for The New Yorker, a Man of Letters and so forth. Maybe there is no inconsistency there. But the writing was good, no doubt, so I stayed with it and, into the second half, I began enjoying it.

At times I also get the impression Updike was trying to remind the reader, Remember now, these are working-class folks, not too bright. But the main struggle was Rabbit himself. I have a soft spot for self-destructive, deeply flawed characters, which Rabbit certainly is; but he is also a conceited bastard who often treats people terribly and expresses barely enough desire to do otherwise.

Here are a couple of my favorite parts. Right in the middle of the book, Rabbit and Ruth are having one of their punchy talks and Ruth says: "You're so mug, is what gets me. Don't you ever think you're going to have to pay a price?" Then a couple pages and many words pass—her thoughts of him, of what she likes about Rabbit, of her past with men from early on, of this fling and her anxiety, of how Rabbit is so screwed up. Finally, the flow of her thinking leads into Rabbit's response:

... That was the thing about him, he just lived in his skin and didn't give a thought to the consequences of anything. Tell him about the candy bars and feeling sleepy he'll probably get scared and off he'll go, him and his good clean piece and his cute little God and his cute little minister playing golf every Tuesday. For the damnedest thing about that minister was that, before, Rabbit at least had the idea he was acting wrong but now he's got the idea he's Jesus Christ out to save the world just by doing whatever comes into his head. I'd like to get hold of the bishop or whoever and tell him that minister of his is a menace. Filling poor Rabbit full of something nobody can get at and even now, filling her ear, his soft cocksure voice answers her question with an idle remote smugness that infuriates her so the tears do come.

"I'll tell you," he says. "When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery." The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool water is sealed into her mouth. "If you have the guts to be yourself," he says, "other people'll pay your price."

Another good line comes when Rabbit returns after the baby has drowned, and his father in-law tells him the undertaker has the body.

Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass. But he nods. He feels he will never resist anything again.