Augusten Burroughs: You Better Not Cry

Augusten Burroughs: You Better Not Cry

In some ways, Augusten Burroughs can be summed up like this: when I picked up You Better Not Cry, his collection of Christmas stories, my mom looked at the cover & said, "What the hell is that?" If you've read Augusten, this oddly makes sense. If you haven't, you should & it will when you do.

I fell in love with Augusten when I read - or more accurately, annihilated - Running with Scissors in high school. Now, I'm kind of jumping around because I have read A Wolf at the Table, which was fantastic & heartbreaking, but not Dry because my cousin currently has my copy & not Possible Side Effects because my cousin used to have my copy. It's a glorified Augusten Burroughs book swap a my house. But the point is, Augusten keeps me hooked by released something new every so often & using Twitter.

While most of Augusten's books are of the long, memoir persuasion, this one's more the short essay type. Some have complained that for this reason it lacks intensity, but it's also what makes it shine. It wouldn't function as a full book because it's not meant to. Instead, we see different Christmas stories as they occurred chronologically, & Augusten jumps right in by starting with a tale of how he started making out with a wax Santa & then literally ate its face. We see everything from the ridiculous to the simple & heartwarming, which is why I'm so drawn to Augusten as a writer. He's not necessarily trying to get you to feel for him or the other people in the stories, but he does anyway.

If you're looking for it to be ridiculously funny, it's not. It has its moments, but really, it's better this way. Augusten doesn't need to be constantly hilarious, even if his humor shines through subtly often. He's just as good serious as he is funny. No need to be alarmed. And in this way, this is actually probably a decent place to start if you want to ease into his writing without going in any kind of order. Or jumping right into the chaos that is basically everything else he's ever written.

Yeah, Christmas is over, but this is a nice, relatively light read for the season. Even my mom ended up picking it up when I'd left it out & started to read it & quite enjoyed it. Plus it was the first book I finished in 2010!