Plus there's the possibility of good music and sex.” Reality quickly intrudes when the clinic staff checks him for cologne (“Oh, you'd be surprised by the things alcoholics will try and sneak in here to drink”) and proceeds along a circuitous path thereafter, with plenty of opportunities for cliffhanging-bad decisions in his love life a coworker trying to sabotage his efforts to reform AA abandonment his best friend's death the “alcoholic terrorist” in his head-weaving in and out of gallows humor and a honed starkness.

It starts with his agreement-dry out, or get fired-to enter rehab he chooses a gay clinic in Minnesota: “a rehab hospital run by fags will be hip. Declaring he's “vain and shallow”-“If I were straight, I am certain I would be one of those guys who goes to wet T-shirt contests and votes with great enthusiasm”-he’s quick to strike a pose to admire his silhouette but in his own half-mad way, he's an original, a step aslant of the cutting edge, and wonderfully capable of expressing the miseries and sublimities of detox. This is his story of trying to keep the next drink from coming. He is not, as he would say, the man you’d want operating the cotton gin-he is funny and dark. Burroughs is an alcoholic, a true-blue, two-fisted, drink-till-you-see-the-spiders-on-the-wall alcoholic. Like the alcohol he so enjoys, Burroughs’s story of getting dry will go straight into your bloodstream and leave you buzzing, exhilarated, and wiped out.īurroughs is a malcontented, successful advertising copywriter: in his 20s, gay, living in Manhattan, and owner of a childhood that the word “nightmare” doesn't even begin to cover (as described in Running With Scissors, 2002).

Dry by augusten burroughs free download