Monday's Excerpts - A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

     When I read A Wolf at the Table last December, I was beginning to delve heavily into sociology, and what all the study contains. Sociopathy especially had become a high interest of mine after reading The Sociopath Next Door. I believed I had found what has always been wrong with my birth mother, and strands of me still tug towards that hypothesis.
     After reading A Wolf, I couldn’t help but speculate that Burroughs’ father had a likelihood of being a sociopath as well; I related so closely to how he was treated as a child and in his later years. The excerpts I have chosen today remind me most of what I experienced growing up the few years my birth mother resided in my young life.
     Although now exiled from the gift of enjoying my existence, my horrors of her still pang at my sides, ratting about my ribcage begging angrily to be freed of my prison skin. I imagine this is close to how Burroughs felt, by reading his descriptions of self-agony after the fact of his father’s absence. I can only hope alongside my willpower that someday I’ll find the solace I seek, too.

This Week's Book: A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

     I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.
     And if I put everything in God’s hands, wasn’t that a copout? If I didn’t get what I wanted I could use God as an excuse, I could say, “He didn’t want me to have it.” When, in fact, maybe I hadn’t worked hard enough on my own.
     If I wanted to be free of my father, it wasn’t up to some man in the sky. It was up to me. (Page 163)

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     I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind—an emptiness—a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn’t even need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such a freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it.
     Maybe, I thought, I don’t need a father to be happy. Maybe, what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what’s missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be. (Page 177)

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     Another thing was clear to me in this moment: I was not him. I was me. Whatever wrong thing he contained, he had not passed it on. (Page 229)

Books read this past week...
★★★★☆ Lord of the Flies by William Golding
★★★★☆ Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
★★★☆☆ The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
★★★★★ River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)