Not all memoirs are so full of good advice as Augusten Burroughs’s “Magical Thinking” (St. Martin’s Press, 268 pages, $23.95). How to kill a mouse trapped in your bathtub? Turn out the lights and induce an epileptic fit with your flashlight. How to poison a neighbor’s kitten? Mix tuna fish with Tylenol. While not all the “true stories” in Mr. Burroughs’s third memoir are about killing small creatures, they represent its signal theme: the battle for survival.

A license to rearrange the facts of life is of obvious appeal to the author of “Running With Scissors,” and it makes an excellent scheme for a collection like this one. “Magical Thinking” includes a number of ho-hum stories that would be remarkable as dinner party set pieces: I dated an undertaker, I got back at a telemarketer, I had a horrible trip to Key West. But there are several good ones, and the book serves as a worthwhile companion to his previous two books.

Where “Running With Scissors” told the story of Mr. Burroughs’s impressively dysfunctional childhood and “Dry” covered the subsequent alcoholism, rehab, and recovery, the current book is drawn from the author’s latter, functional years as an advertising man and writer in Manhattan. His is a world of Chilean Sea Bass, facial lotion from Saks, and online personals.” I was in the habit of wearing a pair of khaki slacks twice, and then instead of taking them across the street to the cleaners, I would simply buy another pair,” he confesses.

But “Magical Thinking” is hardly a confessional memoir. Rather, Mr. Burroughs is fascinated by his own willingness to pay the price of a double espresso at Dean and Deluca, and these espressos and their price are fuel to the damn-the-torpedoes success story he tells. He decides he must write a New York Times bestseller; “Running with Scissors” is just that. He decides to order a log cabin and he doesn’t have any qualms stipulating that it contain a “panic room” with broadband access and concrete walls.

Magical thinking, Mr. Burroughs tells us, is “the belief that one exerts more influence over events than one actually has” – a particularly empowering brand of instant gratification. In one story, Mr. Burroughs is unnerved by a blind date, Raoul, who appears flawless: “I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.” Mr. Burroughs is finally able to dismiss Raoul when the latter proclaims “I’m living proof that you can’t fail if you have a plan. You only fail if you don’t have a plan.” But Mr. Burroughs magical thinking means exactly that: Decide what you want and then wish for it with all your might.

Mr. Burroughs’s advertising past serves his brand of humor, which repackages daily life’s hiccups of doubt and worry with slogans of shopworn friendliness. He calls the defensive correspondence we send to oversensitive lovers the “I Will Make You Seem Crazy e-mail.” The discomfiture a young white man feels when dealing with his maid is “tall-person guilt.” The pleasure of comedies of the quotidian, like “Seinfeld,” is that they make absolutely everything, including our dark side, routine. Mr. Burroughs goes a step farther, subsuming advertising’s twilight zone version of everyday life into the fabric of his own wonderfully flexible sense of common sense.

Perhaps the strongest story in this volume is the first. “Commercial Break,” recalls Mr. Burroughs’s childhood appearance in a Tang commercial. “I can now trace my manic adult tendencies to this moment,” he claims. “Those three words ‘We want you’ were enough to cause my brain to rewire itself, and from then on, I would require more than other people. At the same time, my tolerance for alcohol was instantly increased, and a new neural pathway was created for the future appreciation of crack cocaine and prescription painkillers.”

Mr. Burroughs parades his ruthlessness not only in regards to rodents but also to people – as when he wishes a former employer to die beneath the wheels of a bus. He hears she has died of an aneurysm and is (he claims) delighted by the news. But New Yorkers always like exaggerated versions of the New York stereotype, and when Mr. Burroughs complains that, after months on the Burger King account, “even my wallet smelled like dead cow,” I wasn’t sure whether I wanted him to realize his wallet was a cow, or not.