Books A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - Sick Father
I don't know how you get through a childhood of such disappointment and uncertainty. I'm just glad you were able to write about it and share your childhood with the public. I really enjoyed reading this book even though the story was so dour. I feel grateful of my childhood when I read this type of memoir.

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Rating: - An authentic look at a lonely childhood
This is the first book I read by Burroughs, so I think that I had a bit of an advantage on other people who had read his previous work. I tend to stay away from memoirs to begin with. To me they are generally pretty boring and the authors usually end up sounding like either great whiners or petty bores. And some of the details that Burroughs writes about in this book may saddle him with that same tag, but the emotions that he is able to dredge up outshine any confessions that struck me as unnecessary or too one sided. Indeed, that seems to me to be the greatest strength of the book. The emotions are raw and unfiltered to the degree that they are intensely childlike, there is almost no filter of the mature adult. It is all the greedy emotion of the child who just wants the love and affection of their father. It is irrelevant that his father is in constant pain from arthritis and alcoholism. The child in the book only wants love and the precious gift of time from his parents, neither of which he gets. Other reviews have focused on the intenst narcacissim in the book, but isn't that the point? Who isn't completely focused on themselves and their own needs at that age? I thought the book to be a quite authentic look at the needs and wants(despite how selfish they may be) of a young child. Whether the details are true or not is beside the point; the emotions are crystal clear and almost piercing in their clarity. Focusing on what is true and what is not is a con game of the publishers who market this book. They bank on people reading the book for the sheer joy of reading about a train wreck of a family, or squealing in delight when we come to a part that rings false. The details are unimportant. The book is a faithful recreation of a childhood spent isolated and in fear of the people who are supposed to love you the most. Debating whether it's true or not is a waste of time.

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Rating: - Boring!!!
Sorry Mr. Burroughs, but when you started describing your memories as a toddler, I knew I'd made a mistake in purchasing this book. I found it to be shallow and contrived and I hate to say this, but I almost felt sorry for your father. What a whiney, dull memoir, that certainly doesn't live up to the hype.

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Rating: - Lacks the humor of his other books
A bummer to read. It doesn't take long to get the point that his father was cruel. It must have been cathartic for the author to write, but it didn't need to be a whole book, especially because we already learned about his violent, psoriasis-encrusted dad in "Running with Scissors."