He also makes quick work of self-pity: “Self-pity means waiting for that man with the glass slipper that perfectly fits your foot to knock on your door…Even if you are a victim, you must never be a victim. He notes that studies suggest people rarely leave a six block radius beyond their home and workplace, and if they really want to find love, they need to do some work and explore new activities, meet lots of new people and visit a new dry-cleaners every once in a while. On finding love, he suggests expecting soulmates to be out there for everybody is both “a crutch” to many and actively preventing those individuals from actually finding the partner they seek. Having survived such strife himself, and then spending years overcoming it by writing intimately about his experiences, Burroughs lends not only an informed perspective on many of these topics, but also a unique one.
This serves as a gentle introduction in later chapters Burroughs presents ways to move past loss, reconsider clinging to fruitless dreams, surviving abuse and assault, coping with suicidal depression and finally offering his thoughts on the death of loved ones or a child. This is How addresses a series of emotional hardships one by one, each chapter dedicated to a particular topic such as “How to Fail,” “How to be Sick” or “How to Identify Love by Knowing What It’s Not.” Some of these seem more superficial than others - “How to be Fat” and “How to be Thin” are good examples – and they’re largely grouped at the beginning of the book. His earlier books also help make his first foray into the realm of self-help texts, This is How, a worthwhile and surprising one. Burroughs writes as a man who highlights the extremes of his life in all their traumatic detail, and these memoirs imply it’s a surprise he’s survived long enough to write these accounts at all.
Even attempting to partially catalog the hardships of Burroughs’ younger years would make for an exhausting list - his upbringing included a family taxed by mental illness, the psychiatrist that adopted him into chaos, a life-threatening bout with alchoholism and the drawn out death of a beloved former partner due to complications from HIV. In fact, all of his books except for Sellevision are memoirs, and these all find a curious and heartfelt balance between highlighting (his) life’s brutal challenges and the dark humor that saturates those moments. For most readers, Augusten Burroughs will forever be remembered as the memoirist that wrote Running With Scissors, the hilarious and devastating account of his childhood that was later adapted into a feature film.
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