You Better Not Cry

I was crabby last night, so I went and found my good friend Augusten Burroughs on the bookshelf.

I LOVE Augusten Burroughs.

I’ve read every book he’s written – most of them three or four times.

I don’t typically like “short stories,” but Augusten’s mini-memoirs are different. My biggest beef with short stories is that just about the time you figure out the characters and start to care about them, the story is over. Then you have to start learning new people all over again on the next page.

With Augusten, once you’ve read one story, you have a pretty good idea of who he is and how he sees the world.

I like to think that I have a little bit of Augusten humor in my writing, but maybe that’s wishful thinking.

At any rate, this will be the third time that I’ve read his collection of Christmas stories. My favorite one is the title track (You Better Not Cry) in which he describes being a kid and thinking that Santa and Jesus were one and the same… Or maybe it’s the story about him making a low-income gingerbread tenement is my favorite…