Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking: Model Thinking

Burroughs' stories about modelling are similar to his tales of child-acting woe in many ways. He has high hopes for stardom and believes, through a mixture of pathos and vanity, that nothing can stop him from becoming incredibly successful. Rather than find complete failure, however, he finds relative vindication for his arrogance. Intead of capitalizing on it, however, he throws it away by sitting around and smoking weed all day - again the engineer of his own demise.

Burroughs again demonstrates his bizarre combination of self-love and self-loathing, saying "I knew that my nose was too big and my ears were uneven" in one paragraph, and then condemning the less-than-stellar appearances of his teachers in the next.