Wednesday, December 15, 2004
MEMOIRS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH PRIESTS IN HIDDEN PLACES
_Magical Thinking_ by Augusten Burroughs, a book reviewed in Issue 744 of SSONET the website of the Sydney Star Observer.
This is the author's third book, a collection of short stories, one of which is presented at the website. It's a story of three homosexual encounters with Catholic priests, the first one at age 14. Unlike most of the stories we hear, Burroughs is not angry or resentful. He presents the encounters the way one would talk about going out for ice cream. There is little to no evidence of any emotional involvement, and he seems to have control in each situation. His participation was consensual, and he has no regrets about any of them, but rather a sense of wonder that they occurred at all, given the nature of priesthood.
In reading them I wondered if what I was seeing was the recount of past events filtered through the emotionless state of a man after repeated anonymous homosexual encounters, or if he had really been that detached at age 14.
