Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher

Based on Fisher's one-woman show, this memoir is brutally honest, sincere and candid, and damn funny. It is a very fast read that has an odd but endearing style of writing: choppy but still very readable. More a collection of anecdotes than a narrative it still manages to cover a lot of her life: being born to famous showbiz parents, her two marriages and subsequent divorces, the death of a close friend (in her bed!), her addictions, and her mental health issues. She manages to take all this pain and turn it into a witty, insightful set of stories. Well written, and well done.

First Sentence:

I have to start by telling you that my entire existence could be summed up in one phrase.

Never Mind, by Edward St. Aubyn

I was pretty excited when I picked up this book, the first of five in the Patrick Melrose novels. There was even a blurb on the back from an author I really like—Michael Chabon—reading, "One of the most amazing reading experiences I've had in a decade." Boy, was I disappointed.

The story recounts a weekend gathering of three thoroughly unlikeable couples in the British upper class. Patrick Melrose is the young son of one of these sets of parents, abused by his domineering father and ignored by his submissive addict mother. As a contrast to the coarse characters, however, the writing is both poetic and sophisticated. "After a while he no longer recognized what he was thinking and, just as a shop window sometimes prevents the onlooker from seeing the objects behind the glass and folds him instead in a narcissistic embrace, his mind ignored the flow of impressions from the outside world and locked him into a daydream he could not have subsequently described." Flipping through the book finds passages like this on virtually every page. Despite the beautiful prose, though, I couldn't get past the cruelty of the people being described. I struggled to finish this book, and I don't think I'll be picking up the next one in the series anytime soon.

First Sentence:

At half-past seven in the morning, carrying the laundry she had ironed the night before, Yvette came down the drive on her way to the house.

Coreyography, by Corey Feldman

All I really knew about Corey Feldman before reading his memoir was I liked several of his early movies —Gremlins, The Goonies, Stand By Me, and my favorite, The Lost Boys — and like many child stars, he fell into a well-publicized spiral of drug abuse and unfounded arrogance. After reading Coreyography, though, Feldman comes across as a somewhat tragic figure. Yes, drug abuse is self-inflicted and not usually worthy of much empathy, but abusive parents and sexual molestation make the descent into addiction somewhat understandable, an escape from what must have been a horrible reality. His father was largely absent in Feldman's earliest days, leaving him in the care of his untreated schizophrenic mother and a family that looked at him like a paycheck rather than a person. Later, when his father returned to run his career, an assistant hired by his dad began molesting Feldman, starting a cycle of exploitation that lasted for years and included a couple of half-hearted suicide attempts. When Corey turned 15 he legally emancipated himself from his family, but he had already been introduced to cocaine and sadly found himself with his only adult role model being his friend Michael Jackson. Jackson was still a few years out from his own downfall, but still a long way from what I'd call a positive influence. Two failed marriages and a couple of stints in rehab later, Feldman appears to have gotten his life together and the book ends on a hopeful note, Feldman bonding with his son. This is a surprisingly personal and revealing memoir; I'd expected braggadocio and rationalizations, but instead got an honest look back over an amazingly unhappy life.

First Sentence:

I am three years old, sitting at the small round breakfast table in our tiny kitchen, eyeing a half-open box of cereal.

Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs

This is a troubling memoir of a twelve-year-old boy with mild OCD whose mother gave him away to her bizarre psychiatrist to be raised as a member of his own family. Unfortunately, this new family brings a new meaning to the term unorthodox, where children of all ages have no rules to follow, smoke cigarettes and pot, have sex, and live in a filthy and structurally unsound house. "The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do." Some of the doctors patients periodically move in for extended periods of time as well, including a pedophile. Burroughs begins an intense homosexual relationship with this pedophile that is nearly twenty years his senior, but neither his mother nor his adopted family seems to have any issues with it. The book ends with a now 17-year-old Burroughs headed to New York City without any real plan of where to stay or how to make a living, but generally unconcerned about the situation. "Of course I can make it in New York City. ... Unwittingly, I had earned a Ph.D. in survival."

I'm sure parts of this autobiography are sensationalized but enough of it is clearly true to show just how disturbed some people in this world are. In Golding's Lord of the Flies we see a group of children without supervision devolve into madness; what is more unsettling about Running With Scissors is that there are uncomfortable similarities at times but it isn't fiction. I find it shocking that the only lawsuit that resulted from this was against the author for libel and not against any of the supposed authority figures who let this all happen. It is amazing that Burroughs came out of this squalid home and irresponsible upbringing with enough wit and wisdom to write a searingly honest bestseller. This isn't the sort of book anyone truly enjoys, but it is certainly worth reading.

First Sentence:

My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Naté, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick.

Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, by Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour

Hunter S. Thompson was a very strange person. A writer of undeniable talent, but strange nonetheless. This book is a collection of interviews stitched together in a single narrative. Hunter's life brought him into contact with a wide slice of life, so while many accounts are told by the expected family and friends, people as varied as Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Carter, Jack Nicholson, and James Carville contributed as well. Considering that one of the authors, Jann Wenner, was Hunter's editor for over thirty years, the overall attitude towards Hunter was surprisingly negative. Admittedly Hunter was a lifelong drug and alcohol abuser which rarely makes for pleasant personalities, but I'd always thought he was more of a lovable character like Doonesbury's Uncle Duke for whom Hunter was the inspiration. Looks like that isn't so. "The thing about those unpleasant nights is that they didn't end. The unpleasantness wasn't a quick outburst." "For those of us who worked with him, it was essentially a really abusive relationship." "He demanded such an extraordinary amount of loyalty, commitment, and energy, and although he paid back a lot of that, he just sucked people dry." But basically he just comes off as crazy. "My first job was to get Hunter up in the morning. I knocked on his door, and there was a long, loud eruption of curses. ... It was just the life force announcing itself through Hunter's early-morning self." "And damn if he didn't raise the gun and fire from the hip and blow the door frame out that I was standing about six inches from my side." "When I had left the year before, Hunter had thrown my clothes out onto the driveway and set fire to them." This does not sound like someone with whom I'd want to spend a lot of time.

I'll never be a huge Hunter S. Thompson fan, but I did enjoy reading about him.

First Sentence:

We had guns in our cars.

Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs

This was picked for our book club because of its common description as one of the most important classic novels of the twentieth century. After reading it, I can only assume the importance is due to the obscenity trials and censorship issues it spawned that forced a closer examination of our right to free speech rather than the novel itself. Naked Lunch is the delusional raving of a drug-fueled homosexual, with graphic descriptions of sadistic pedophilia and wild hallucinations. There isn’t much of a linear plot, as evidenced by Burroughs himself when he said that he intended for the chapters to be read in any order. It reads like the world’s worst Mad Lib which afterwards was randomly scrambled. “The nostalgia fit is on me boys and will out willy silly . . . boys walk down the carny midway eating pink spun sugar . . . goose each other at the peep show . . . jack off in the Ferris wheel . . . throw sperm at the moon rising red and smoky over the foundries across the river. A Nigra hangs from a cottonwood in front of The Old Court House . . . whimpering women catch his sperm in vaginal teeth . . .”

This book is a classic in the same way that Pollock’s paintings are: unique, random, and meaningless but holding great appeal for professors and critics. I know I sound like that old man at the end of the block shaking his fist at the world while yelling, “Get off my lawn!” but as far as I can tell Naked Lunch has no redeeming value whatsoever. Dull and non-nonsensical, this is a truly awful book.

First Sentence:

I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train . . . Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me.

Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis

This is quite possibly the strangest novel I’ve ever read. The book introduces loser detective Mike McGill who is hired by the President’s chief of staff to find the secret second Constitution of the United States (to be used only in case of emergency) which has been lost for decades. As strange as this sounds, it is only a framing story for a trip through the seedy underbelly of society. We meet a group that uses reptiles as erotica, another that injects saline into their testicles for a thrill, and still another that holds sex parties where a form of Russian Roulette is played with an HIV positive person instead of a bullet. The individuals are just as twisted: a crazy oilman with mounted dolphins, kittens, and seals on the wall instead of the usual deer and bear heads, a burned out paranoid private investigator having a nervous breakdown, and of course, a serial killer. On top of all this, Ellis also gives us a handful of colorful facts, such as “the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was actually a CIA blind created specifically to cover a possible breach of security over astronauts with extensive bioelectronic modification escaping the system and going public.” I couldn’t put this book down!

The writing style was just as eccentric, with some chapters not even a page long. Chapter 3 was probably my favorite:

An hour later, I walked into some freak bar on Bleecker Street and yelled, “I’m buying a hundred drinks—for me!”
Oh, they beat the shit out of me.

Chapter 6 was even shorter, but not quite as funny:

I wish I still had that photo.

The sardonic humor kept me laughing, the unexpected style kept me surprised, and the plot kept me turning pages. I highly recommend this to anyone looking for something unusual.

First Sentence:

I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug.

From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France, by David Walsh

Bleah. This is a one-sided whack job on Lance Armstrong, all circumstantial evidence and hearsay. I'm not a cycling fan and there has been plenty of proof that the sport is riddled with performance enhancing drugs, but the fact remains that no allegations against Lance have yet been proven. Do I think Lance is a clean rider? The circumstances seems against him, but with cycling officials, opposing teams, and the world at large watching him like a hawk, it seems very odd that no one can catch him in the act. We are supposed to believe the author is a non-partisan journalist simply presenting interviews and background information, allowing the reader to decide who to believe. Unfortunately, it is all very one-sided with no realistic opposing viewpoint. Considering that Walsh is also the author of L.A. Confidentiel, a French anti-Armstrong book, the idea of journalistic integrity is completely shattered.

First Sentence:

It was one of the tougher moments in Greg Strock's unfulfilled career in cycling: the moment when he had to accept it was over.