You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas by Augusten Burroughs; St. Martin's Press, $21.99
I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death and New Jersey by Paul Rudnick; HarperCollins, $23.99
If laughter truly is the best medicine, then let humorist Augusten Burroughs and playwright Paul Rudnick keep you in the best of health this fall. Both of these authors have new books out, and the two have key ingredients in common: humor, intelligence, and an obvious passion for the craft of storytelling. In comedic lockstep with each other, Burroughs offers hilariously personal memories on the "magic" of Christmastime, while Rudnick presents sharp-witted opinions and observations on everything from life in New Jersey to the melodramatic tsunami surrounding his script for 1992's Sister Act.
Defending his title as the undisputed king of self-deprecating humor, Burroughs dives right into the new seven-story collection You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas with chronologically arranged reflections on what confused him as a child and befuddled him as he aged. As an awkward, bumbling kid, he learned that the Pledge of Allegiance was puzzling, Jesus was as misleading and interchangeable as Santa Claus, and that if you kiss a wax statue of Kris Kringle long and hard enough, his face will melt and deform. True to form, there are hilarious moments of classic Burroughs wisdom like these: Hansel and Gretel "deserved to die for their lack of imagination and poor real estate choices," and Catholic school "didn't even have real teachers, just a bunch of ladies that were old and papery and drank all our apple juice."
From there, Burroughs shares a curious memory of waking up in bed with a "Dirty French Santa" he'd apparently spent a drunken night with, before moving on to more illuminating terrain. The final two stories are rich with heartfelt authenticity. One details a poignant holiday season spent with George, Burroughs' former lover grappling with "our tiny new virus, AIDS." In the final piece, "Silent Night," the author's eternal quest for normalcy is finally met with some semblance of attainment.
It's definitely a 360-degree turnaround from his intensely candid, 2008 memoir on life with an alcoholic father, A Wolf at the Table – and thankfully so, as this assortment of Yuletide mishaps is big on eye-rolling absurdity, yet small enough to fit into a best friend's Christmas stocking.
Rudnick's screenplay and scriptwriting credits include Addams Family Values (1993), Jeffrey (1995), In and Out (1997), and the initial drafts for the Whoopie Goldberg vehicle Sister Act, which he details at great length in just one of the 15 humorously autobiographical essays included in his collection I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death and New Jersey. With numerous Hollywood meetings bringing riotous frustration to him as well as a rushed education in the messy moviemaking machine, his involvement in Sister Act became an exercise in patience. Especially after an ambivalent Bette Midler was eventually replaced with Whoopie as the lead, using an overly scrutinized script that "was now the product of many hands."
Scattered throughout the vignettes are excerpts from the diary of Elyot Vionnet, a feisty, fictional New Yorker who offers his own unique brand of pop-cultural wisdom. The use of an alter-ego to elicit humor and a sassy sensibility has worked before, when Rudnick wrote a popular column for Premiere magazine using the pseudonym Libby Gelman-Waxner. In this format, Vionnet is such an engaging, vivid character he could very well stand alone in a book all to himself (which surely would please him to no end).
Other pieces dramatically and intimately detail more Hollywood casting dirt on his other film involvements, his gay coming-of-age in New York City, his unique diet, a summer spent working as a cabaret janitor, the early days of AIDS, the death of his father, and, of course, growing up in Piscataway, New Jersey. There's a lot to take in here; Rudnick is an amiable narrator, but one who seemingly never runs out of gas, as if propelled by shots of espresso. The characters that have dipped into and out of his life fly by like flocks of birds, often leaving only marginal impressions. He concludes the book with a look into the bawdy days inside the infamous Chelsea Hotel.
It's odd that Rudnick fails to mention the pride and the process (or lack thereof) behind his screenplay for the ill-conceived disaster that became 2004's remake of The Stepford Wives. But this new memoir is a campy hit overstuffed with the magic that made his other endeavors such successes, so let's just forgive and forget, shall we?