by JULIET WATERS

Augusten Burroughs writes in his latest book Magical Thinking: True Stories: "I never expected Sellovision to be a best seller. I called it my ‘cheese popcorn' book." Which is a good thing, since it wasn't. "Then I wrote a memoir about my childhood. And this, I decided, needed to be a New York Times bestseller, high on the list." He decided this against the advice of his agent and his therapist. Magical thinking, the belief that you yield a greater influence over events than you actually do, is a personality disorder that usually results in disappointment and frustration. For Burroughs, however, it seems to be making him almost too happy.

Running With Scissors, his very dark, hilarious memoir about being a boy genius abandoned by his mentally ill mother and raised by an abusive psychiatrist, did in fact become a New York Times best seller. So did his follow-up, Dry, a self-portrait of his recovery from extreme alcoholism. Gushed one critic about Running With Scissors, "After reading this memoir I don't see any point in anyone ever writing about an unhappy childhood again." Not much later, Dry put Burroughs on Entertainment Weekly's annual list of "The 25 Funniest People in America."

This quick career arc from critical darling to pop culture success isn't a surprise. At 17, Burroughs passed his GED and enrolled in college as a pre-med student. By 19, he had quit and started his career as a boy wonder in the advertising world. Burroughs has always been as remorselessly shallow as he is brilliant. A kind of American Oscar Wilde, it's been talent - probably more than expectations - that has gotten him where he is.

But talent has nothing to do with the disabilities and deaths that have afflicted some of the people Burroughs has wished harm on. Given his childhood, one doesn't necessarily blame him for jumping on every crack in an effort to break his mother's back. "Whether because of this, or for reasons unrelated, she's now in a wheelchair partially paralyzed." Then there was the boss from hell whom Burroughs willed under the wheels of a bus. A month later he learned that she had died of a sudden brain aneurysm while waiting for an elevator. "I hung up the phone smiling and marvelled, ‘That's even better than a bus.'"

He may not be exaggerating when he writes, "I have a cruel streak a mile wide." Much of Magical Thinking reads like someone who flipped a coin over becoming a writer or a serial killer. In writing about an epic power struggle with a Manhattan cleaning lady/con artist he writes: "It was unnerving the way she could go from cool efficiency to sarcastic to sweet within the space of thirty seconds. I found it very manipulative and controlling. It put the other person constantly on-guard. And it was extremely intimidating, because you never knew when she was going to snap… I made a mental note to refine these skills within myself."

Burroughs' struggle, or lack of struggle, to overcome the constant temptation of becoming as abusive as the people who abused him more often than not makes for some pretty funny reading. The amateur therapist in me thinks his magical thinking, even the black magical thinking, may actually be a healthy reparative fantasy. But, I'm also hesitant to get on this guy's bad side.

If Sellovision was Burroughs' cheese popcorn, then Magical Thinking is his Cracker Jack. It's a tad too narcissistic, and every once in a while you come across a lazy patch that feels like one of those throwaway plastic toys. It's the kind of book written to coast on success for a while, hopefully before delving back into the deep. The critics won't like it as much, but it's unlikely someone with this much talent and ambition is going to be fading back into obscurity.

Magical Thinking: True Stories by Augusten Burroughs,
St. Martin's Press, hc, 288pp, $33.95