From After Elton: 

“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 epitomizeA 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. 

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.”

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.

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.