Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking: Commercial Break

I enjoyed "Commercial Break," one of the stories from by Augusten Burroughs, because it reminded me of my own experience (singular) with professional child acting. The way Burroughs describes the hope that THIS will be your big break, that stardom is just around the corner; I experienced it all at the age of eleven. I won't go into it - suffice to say I experienced a similarly crushing disappointment.

Like most of what Burroughs writes, the conclusion of the story is an unhappy one, and he sets it up from the beginning. It's clear to the reader that young Burroughs, full of hope and vain pride, is destined to find heartbreak at the cruel hands of reality. The two well-dressed men that he so desperately relies on forsake him, as does his beloved Tang. Burroughs is good at giving hints throughout the story as to the outcome - a talent which he uses throughout Magical Thinking. In this story, along with so many of his others, he reveals only the petty, heartless side of human nature - a perfect counterpoint, I've always thought, to his contemporary David Sedaris, who I'm also reading at the moment. They're both from highly dysfunctional families, both devastatingly funny, both write autobiographical short-stories; if I didn't know better, I'd swear they were the same person, one writing about the good in life and the other about the bad.