![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When You Are Engulfed in Flames, a roundup of 22 essays, all but two of which have been previously published in The New Yorker and other magazines, never quite gets off the couch. Regardless of where you stand on the issue of playing fast and loose with the truth, you may emerge from Sedaris' latest collection of essays wishing he'd played it a little faster and looser - 'cause it ain't very funny. Sedaris himself has confessed to exaggeration in the name of humor. ")īurroughs' peer in this field - the flourishing category of kinda-gay, family-centric, literary stand-up comedy memoir - is David Sedaris, who prefers to call himself a "humorist." Sedaris recently came to the defense of James Frey, whose own exaggerations (yeah, lies) in a memoir brought shame even to Oprah. (At which point the reader chuckles, "You haven't met my Aunt Agnes. ![]() There was even a lawsuit based on this claim, which Burroughs settled in August, all the while defending his work as "entirely accurate." And when his new real-life musings, A Wolf at the Table, were published earlier this year, many critics scratched their heads and asked whether anyone could truthfully (a) remember this many vivid, minute details about their childhood and (b) have a family that could possibly be this otherworldly, violent and bizarre. Last year, a Vanity Fair article alleged that Augusten Burroughs had fabricated major chunks of his bestselling memoir, Running With Scissors. ![]()
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