Book 937: Burn Rate – Andy Dunn

When someone in the marketing department at the publisher reached out about this because I’d positively reviewed David Chang’s Eat a Peach, I had to take a few minutes to really think if I wanted to go back into this world.*

In Chang’s book, his mental health struggles are peripheral, but in Dunn’s Burn Rate, he centers them. I spent quite a bit of time reading about bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and other mental health issues before my mom died a few years ago to try and understand what she was going through and what my sister and I were experiencing. And that REALLY hit home when the first quote Dunn uses in his book is a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison who wrote THE book (An Unquiet Mind) about brains and bipolar/manic depression/brains in general.

Dunn takes us on a journey from his childhood to the multi-million dollar sale of the company he co-founded, Bonobos, and it is a no-holds-barred no-punches-pulled stark look in the mirror for him and for anyone who has ever loved/known someone who has gone through similar experiences.

My Ghost is an illness—one that can amplify potential and seek to destroy it at the same time. For some, a ghost like mine might even seem life-expanding—jet fuel for the entrepreneurial drive—before the liabilities rip it all apart. (Author’s Note)

Where Dunn excelled, for me at least, was in finding the balance of sharing how betrayed/abandoned he felt by his family and medical professionals without blaming them. And he did the same thing for himself. He went through his denial with as fine a tooth comb as he did with his parents.

The things that really hit home for me and my experience with my mom were when it came to the substance abuse, refusal to take medicine/inability to stick with medicine, and depression:

The number of intersecting forces—conscious and subliminal, societal and cultural, biochemical and otherwise—conspiring to enable a patient to stop taking their medication is enormous. (Chapter 3: God is a Woman)

If you can’t be the person you want to be when you’re sober, maybe you can become that person when you’re drinking. Substances become critical to this endeavor, and so mental illness and substance abuse become interlaced. The life of the party is almost always dying inside.” (Chapter 8: Sine Curve)

. . . I had nothing tethering me to a routine. It’s one of the cruelties of depression that it sometimes hits when you are supposed to be having a peak life experience, and there is nothing you can do about it. (Chapter 16: The Opposite House)

As annoyed as I get with how often mental health is discussed on social media and in literature these days, I do have to admit that it’s 1,000x better that we’re starting (yeah, we’ve barely cracked the surface) to talk about it than just in the few decades since I was a teenager. Do I think drugs (legal/recreational/illegal/prescribed) are the answer to every single one of them? No. Do I think therapy and having someone to talk to about these things are incredibly helpful and useful? For the most part, yes.

And Dunn did a really great job of not extrapolating from his own experience with mental health issues and as an entrepreneur to cast a broad light/net/assumption on everyone who experiences or is. The use of “I” statements (oh, hey therapy) and grounding everything in his experience, and trying to get to the bottom of things with those who experienced the journeys with him were vital to the authenticity of this book.

It is what we hate about ourselves that we most dislike in others. In our feelings about others, there is always a kernel of how we feel about ourselves. (Chapter 10: Imagine Your Enemy)

Manic delusions and entrepreneurial delusions, while not twins, are not unrelated. They’re more like distant cousins. The capacity for one doesn’t guarantee—but can indicate—the capacity for the other. (Chapter 15: Life Is a Dream)

What I didn’t expect to enjoy as much was his biting wit and humor. Dunn did a great job of writing various scenes from his life balancing the trauma of what he, his family, and his friends went through, while also somehow still finding humor in a lot of the darkest situations.

Spaly was my new roommate on campus at Stanford Graduate School of Business, or simply ‘the GBS,’ as insiders call it. A three-letter acronym to rival the school’s rival: HBS, or Harvard Business School. If business schools were houses at Hogwarts, HBS would be Slytherin, all cunning and ambition, and the GSB would be Gryffindor, all courage and compassion, and with a slightly self-righteous undercurrent of moral and entrepreneurial superiority. In other words: perfect for me. (Chapter 4: Wantrepreneur)

Seriously, though, the chapter titles were all on point when it came to humor and irreverence. This was balanced with some of the surrealist passages when he experienced hypomania and depression. They weren’t the easiest to read, but Dunn pulled you into the experience with him from the 48 hours in Las Vegas where the reader careens out of control with Dunn to the depressive dive after he stepped away from Bonobos for a bit, you experience it with him. And don’t even get me started on the scene with his girlfriend and her mother, and subsequent events that were one of the final breaking points, I was almost in tears because Dunn did such a great job of putting you in everyone’s shoes.

When it comes to disclosing a diagnosis, the good news is this: it takes only a minute to actually say what it takes you an ocean of time to be able to say. When you get there, after all that time, it is stunning how fast you can put it out there. (Chapter 19: Noose to the Sky)

Recommendation: This should be a must-read for entrepreneurs/business classes, therapists, and so many other people. There are so many takeaways from what not to do with your friends/co-workers and mental health professionals, to self-care and the importance of open communication and learning from your mistakes. There were so many people Dunn could’ve blamed for nearly two decades of his life, including himself, and even though he may have done that in the moment as you’re reading the book, he and everyone he’s interacted with during this time had to go through a lot of discovery and healing for them all to be where they are today.

*I received a copy of Burn Rate via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “In Hindi, there are at least ten words for ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle.'”

Closing Line: “I knew that I never would.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)