It's All Relative

This morning I share a note from Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac".

You all know I think my life is challenging. And then I hear of someone where I believe it's a miracle he or she survived. Read on.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of memoirist Augusten Burroughs, born Christopher Robison in Pittsburgh (1965). He was 13 when his mother gave him up to be raised by her New Age psychiatrist, a man who believed in solving problems by poking his finger into the Bible at random and seeing what it said. Burroughs spent the next five years living in a pink Victorian mansion with the psychiatrist and his wife, their six children, and a number of live-in mental patients. Burroughs and the other children in the house had no supervision at all: They drank and took drugs, played with the electroshock therapy machine, and Burroughs was sexually abused by one of the psychiatrist's patients. He finally ran away, changed his name, got a high school degree, and became an advertising copywriter. But he said, "I really felt like my childhood, my past and my lack of any education was this extra, deformed leg I was dragging around behind me, trying to keep under my jacket." So he wrote a book about it, called Running with Scissors, which came out in 2002 and became a best-seller in part because Burroughs managed to make his horrific childhood experiences funny. His most recent book is the collection of essays Possible Side Effects, which came out this year (2007).

Again I am reminded that I don't have it so bad.