I read “Possible Side Effects” the other day, and was somewhat disappointed. A friend of mine had highly recommended Augusten Burroughs, and I bought the book expecting Burroughs to be another David Sedaris, but instead I found a mess. An orderly mess, but a mess nonetheless. Hey, that rhymes.
A typical paragraph is constructed like so: short sentence, short sentence, long sentence, short sentence, sentence fragment, sentence fragment. It’s regular enough to be considered stylistic, but irritating. Most of the fragments are unnecessary, obvious, and reading them feels like stumbling over the prose. A good sentence fragment serves as a verbal punctuation mark. Burroughs’ sentence fragments feel more like a verbal !!!!!!!1!!!!11.
