It's beginning to look a lot like... a select dozen new Christmas-themed books.
You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas
by Augusten Burroughs
In You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Augustine Burroughs runs wild with the scissors poking holes in all sorts of sacred cows and Christmastime rituals. The witty and wistful memoir, alternately acerbic and poignant, is arranged roughly in chronological order, beginning with young Augustine fighting the better-not-pout edict in his bafflement about Santa and Jesus, who he had believed were the same entity. “I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house?" (A confusion perhaps akin to my more chimney-oriented misunderstanding.) Another story highlights the six-foot stuffed Santa his grandparents bought him one Christmas, a perhaps too jolly ol’ St. Nick that drew Burroughs so much that his innocent kisses accelerated into him eating Santa's wax face. "Even from across the room I could see the carnage that was Santa's face. I'd disfigured him, hideously," he writes. "I felt sure that even Jesus, with his love for the maimed, would turn away." Okay, it’s official: You Better Not Cry is not for the squeamish — or the saintly. (Those unfamiliar with the author of Running with Scissors and A Wolf at the Table should heed a disclaimer of sorts that Burroughs’ approach is not skewed toward religion – even in a Christmas-themed book — but is more of humor and harrowing honesty.)
As the book advances with the seven short stories winding down into Burroughs’ adulthood, he demonstrates a chestnuts-roasting sentimentalism and spirit of sorts, extending to ornaments and lights, if not Currier and Ives. The humanism that permeates the last two stories, which discuss his relationships with significant men in his life and offer more insight and depth than the early pieces, begins with “The Best and Only Everything” in which Burroughs recalls long-ago holidays spent with a former lover dying of AIDS. A decade later, in the last story “Silent Night,” Burroughs portrays some extra domestic frustration that comes with a burst water pipe while he readies himself to celebrate the season with a tree for the first time since the death of his old boyfriend. In fact, an earnestness prevails, a longing for ordinariness amidst a disordered life made manifest, the scissors put away.
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