Parenting & Family Quote by Augusten Burroughs

Normalcy is the provocation here, not the trauma. Burroughs leads with a disarming premise: he wasn’t a morbid kid hunting darkness, wasn’t secretly “built” for chaos. He wanted the small-bore things our culture treats as default rights of childhood - safety, predictability, a life that doesn’t require a memoir to explain it. That opening clause is a preemptive strike against a common, lazy suspicion aimed at people with catastrophic backstories: that they must have invited it, courted it, had some innate appetite for “depraved or extreme situations.” He refuses the myth of the trauma connoisseur.

Then comes the pivot: “Unfortunately, that’s just not what happened.” The sentence is almost comically plain, like a shrug written in black ink. That understatement is the engine. By declining melodrama, Burroughs forces you to feel the mismatch between what a child is supposed to get and what he actually got. The dryness reads as both defense mechanism and aesthetic choice: the voice of someone who learned early that pleading doesn’t change the weather, so you report it.

The subtext is about agency and blame. Childhood, in his telling, isn’t an origin story you curate; it’s something that happens to you, often at the hands of adults who control the thermostat of reality. Coming from a writer known for excavating family dysfunction with mordant humor, the line also signals his project: not sensationalizing the extremes, but insisting they’re aberrations imposed on an otherwise ordinary desire to be okay. That insistence is what makes the pain legible - and the irony bite.