“God, please take my father away. Please make him leave. I am very afraid that he’s going to do something bad. There’s something wrong with him. And I am very worried that my mother and I won’t make it. She used to say he was dangerous, and I didn’t understand. But now I do. If death is the only answer, please take him. If he doesn’t hurt me, I’m afraid I might hurt him. I’ve become quite good with the rifle, you know. I’m sure you’ve seen me. Unless you think I’m the one that’s bad and then you can take me. I won’t be mad at you.”

This prayer was young Augusten Burroughs’s way of asking his Heavenly Father for protection against his earthly father. It gains poignancy from the fact that prayer was one of the things that Augusten’s dad did not approve of: “Jesus Christ, Augusten. You’re much too old for this praying business, much too old.”

Augusten Burroughs’s childhood prayer and his sire’s disapproval epitomize A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of my Father (St. Martin’s Press; 256 pages; $24.95). What should have been a nurturing, supportive relationship between father and son became a lifelong struggle between a distant, disapproving and often violent father and an insecure, fearful and eventually resentful son.

In his best-selling memoir Running with Scissors (2002), author Augusten Burroughs wisely kept his father at a distance: There his dad was only a minor character who existed solely as a boogie man for the author and his mother to run away from. If there was a “father figure” in that book, it was Dr. Finch, the brilliant but controversial psychiatrist who took young Augusten in during some of his mother’s many crises.

Burroughs had to wait for his father to die before he could write about him at any length. A Wolf at the Door: A Memoir of My Father is Burroughs’s long-awaited attempt to place his father at the center of his narrative. The result is a grim piece, a far cry from the wit and humor of Scissors and Burroughs’s other collections of essays and, for at least one reader, a most uncomfortable experience. It is also Burroughs’s best-written book.

Augusten Burroughs’s father was John G. Robison, head of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Those who knew the amiable Professor in his professional life would hardly recognize him as the violent, alcoholic psychopath who often terrorized his wife and two sons with his mind-boggling “games.”

Only those who had the misfortune to know him intimately knew the elder Robison’s dark side. At his best, Augusten’s dad was a distant figure unable to relate to or sympathize with his younger child. At worst, he was a monster capable of killing his son’s beloved pet and even threatening to kill Augusten, inflicting mental harm upon him that was worse than any physical abuse. A boy who would come to believe that “My father did not deserve to breathe” was not a happy child.

It is difficult to write about one’s father, even under the best circumstances. In the case of gay men, our relationships with our fathers are often affected by their homophobia and by our fear that we disappointed our parent by being who we are. Though Burroughs was clearly a disappointment to his dad, it is not clear if Augusten’s budding sexuality had any part in creating their dysfunctional relationship. (If anything, Professor Robison’s relationship with his straight older son was even more violent.) A Wolf at the Table is a “gay book” only because it was written by Augusten Burroughs, a writer “who happens to be gay.”

It would have been interesting (to say the least) if John G. Robison had lived to tell his side of these events. For better or worse, A Wolf at the Table is Burroughs’s side of the story. Readers who are easily disturbed by dysfunctional family quarrels should stay far away from A Wolf at the Table. Even those of us who enjoy this type of thing will find this book a difficult read. We wonder not that it took Burroughs so long to write about his father, but feel glad that he finally found the strength to do so. A Wolf at the Table is a book that Burroughs eventually had to do and he’s done it well.

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John Polly of LogoOnline.com recently interviewed
Augusten Burroughs about his new book: