YOU BETTER NOT CRY, the latest collection of
short stories from Augusten Burroughs, describes a whole life in seven
Christmases—his tales of family dysfunction and personal
careening are, at various times, snappy, powerful, and trivial. It’s
everything you would expect from a holiday release by the author of
Running with Scissors, a fact that is both satisfying and
disappointing, like waking up on Christmas morning and realizing that
you have nothing to yearn for.
The snippets of memoir hop around Burroughs’ childhood, in which
everyone socializes as if at a cocktail party, to his early adulthood,
when he spends a Christmas with homeless people, to his calmer, later
years. Despite the thematic links, the stories are unique in their
subjects, and there is a sparse, tucked-corner neatness to how he
packages an autobiography in Yule-tides.
Burroughs’ writing is uneven throughout, transitioning from funny
and succinct to pushy and hyperbolic. The story “Why Do You Reward Me
Thus?,” about the aforementioned Christmas with the bums, is full of
honesty, and one of the best. Others are weighed down with exaggerated
metaphors to fill up pages. For example, he notes that having to learn
the Pledge of Allegiance in school seems to us today like “forcing a
child to drink the blood of a sacrificial goat or unfurl a Tabriz
prayer rug and kneel barefoot on it while facing Mecca.” In the duller
patches, Burroughs loses the impish and cruel wit that established
him, and instead just says the darndest things. (No, Augusten, Jesus
and Santa are not the same person.)
For all of Burroughs’ sacrilege, loneliness, and misanthropic
tendencies, he never questions the wonder of Christmas. He loves tinsel
and gingerbread and Santa, and the annual opportunity to stress-test
his closest relationships, whether that means bargaining with his
parents for a bar of gold or spending Christmas with no family at all.
It’s like dredging a string of lights from the closet to see how many
still glow. Those looking for a more skeptical view of the holidays
will be disappointed, but reminded at least of the joy in not having
your wishes fulfilled.