Review: Dry by Augusten Burroughs

Ok, so I'm about to go to lunch, and then I'll edit this to show my full opinion on the book Dry, but I just to go ahead and post SOMETHING.

I could not put this book down at work. For 2 days I've read the 300 pages. It was so, so, so good! It makes me seriously reconsider how I felt about Running With Scissors. Maybe I should re-read it. Seriously.
Ok, so I'm going to go to lunch and then I can't wait to blog about Dry. I'll probably do a horrible job of telling just how good it is, but I'll give it a shot.

Ok...Now time for the REAL review...

Dry reminded me a lot of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey....though not entirely. Basically, Dry starts off years later, once Augusten has taken up a well paying job for an advertising company. Immediately, he sweeps you into his life of work-then booze. It seems, at least to me, to start off as just a get together with a friend at a bar...and then you realize he has a problem by the time he's on his 10th martini of the night.

You can tell from the very beginning why he's drinking. He had a traumatic childhood, his mother left him with a crazy doctor and his family, he was in a relationship with a pedophile when he was 13, and never really had a place to call "home". On top of that, he dropped out of elementary school, he has a job he doesn't like (but brings in the money), has a best friend (whom he loves-but tries to distance himself) who has HIV, and another friend who's his drinking buddy. Put all of that together, and you can imagine why he wants to drown everything with alcohol.

One would wonder how long a person could keep that kind of lifestyle up AND keep their job. Well...Augusten gets lucky and his co-workers decide to do an intervention on him one day after another long night, to which he comes to work reeking of alcohol. I'm not exactly sure how long he had been doing this-going to work late in the mornings, coming home and starting drinking...but to have co-workers care enough about you and know you're wasting your talents on alcohol, is comforting-at least to me.

Augusten goes to rehab (of course, before-which he gets plastered every night). I would say he does pretty well in rehab. He makes some friends, especially one, who is British names, Hayden. After he leaves rehab, he is supposed to go to group meetings, individual counseling sessions, and AA meetings. He keeps this up for a while, which is impressive. He meets a hot guy by the name of Foster, who is a crack addict going to the same group therapy session as him.

I really felt sorry for Augusten when he described his relationships with men. Jim, his drinking buddy, couldn't really be his friend after rehab (because Jim had to learn to change his ways-which he eventually does at the end of the book), Foster is a crack addict-who can't stay away from crack. Then there's Pighead. He's the HIV positive friend. Augusten tells of his love for Pighead, but Pighead didn't love Augusten the same way. THEN Pighead was diagnosed with HIV and soon afterwards, he realized he did, in fact, love Augusten...But at that point, it was too late. Augusten distanced himself from Pighead because he thought it would be easier once Pighead finally succumbed to the disease.

Honestly, I was pulling for Augusten the whole time. I was pulling for him to win his battle with alcoholism, to right his relationships, and get help for his friends who needed it. The end is where you really see him battling his demons and I really enjoyed reading about it. It's amazing what goes on in the mind of addicts, and what they would do to just have one more hit or one more drink, etc. I could not put this book down.

Like I said, the way he wrote this book, makes me want to go back and re-read Running With Scissors because it was fabulously written. I guess this time, when I re-read it, I won't read it during lunch :)