Lust & Wonder by Augusten Burroughs; St. Martin's Press, $26.99
Upon finishing reading Augusten Burroughs' new memoir Lust & Wonder, the proverb "Contentment breeds mediocrity" immediately came to mind. Burroughs became famous through his two previous mind-blowing yet hilarious books, Running with Scissors (2002), essaying his bizarre family history/psychosis, being adopted by a lunatic psychiatrist who gives him drugs, and being molested by another patient; and Dry (2003), chronicling a decade later, following Burroughs' life as a successful advertising copywriter in NY and raging alcoholic who signs up for treatment at a gay rehab center in Minnesota. Perhaps the Grand Guignol calamitous circumstances of Burroughs' life, enlivened by his acerbic wit, couldn't help but make those accounts so fascinating and compulsively readable. Sadly, that is not the case with Lust & Wonder, which picks up where Dry left off, with Burroughs living in NYC as a struggling freelance writer. The core of the book is Burroughs' reflection on three major relationships he has experienced in the last two decades.
The first romance is with Mitch, a famous author who wrote Burroughs' favorite novel. He sends Mitch a fan email letter, and subsequently meets him at a restaurant, where Burroughs breaks his sobriety with a vodka martini. This is not the only ominous sign of trouble ahead. By the fourth date, despite claiming he is madly in love, Burroughs is already calling him Secondhand Mitch, "as he looked used up already." The chief problem is that there is no sexual chemistry between them, which they each realize privately but don't want to acknowledge together out loud. Burroughs discovers that Mitch has assumed another name in an AOL chat room (this is the mid-1990s) and is cheating on him. But Burroughs has already had sex with an ex-boyfriend, as well as discovering he is still in love with George, a crack addict succumbing to AIDS whom we first met in Dry.
Both the relationships with Mitch and George die, resulting in depression, drunken blackouts, bed-wetting, and compulsive QVC jewelry-buying binges, though through this dark interval Burroughs will write and publish his first novel Sellevision, a satire on the home shopping network.
He then meets the older Dennis on a popular Internet dating site. They wait to have sex, but when they do there are no fireworks. Still this is Burroughs' first relationship while sober, and he longs to experience it in all its dreary reality. Burroughs wants security and safety despite little to no sex. Dennis will become his business manager. Burroughs is diagnosed with ADD and prescribed Adderall to rather disastrous effect. During this period he will write his Scissors and Dry memoirs, but he says nothing about how celebrity has impacted him, and lives through 9/11 with remarkably little comment. When asked by Burroughs, Dennis admits he is not in love with him, but being too old and tired to start again, says they should just make it work. When Burroughs emails Dennis and suggests telling him what is wrong in a letter, he receives a list several pages long about all the things he loathes about him, revealing years of pent-up resentments after denying anything was amiss. Dennis recommends they see a couples therapist to save the relationship, while Burroughs wants only to break up.
What Burroughs had neglected to tell Dennis was that a few months earlier he had fallen in love with his decade-long literary agent, Christopher. Burroughs was initially attracted to the blond Christopher, but was turned off finding out he was HIV-positive. But with his increasing disillusionment about Dennis and with Christopher's bout with cancer, Burroughs realizes how much he cares about his best friend. He sends a long email relaying his infatuation to the reluctant Christopher, who in a short time admits he feels similarly about Burroughs. They have sex three times a day, with Burroughs finally discovering the importance of passion in a relationship. Meanwhile, Dennis and Christopher had become friends through the years, and Burroughs unchivalrously sends Christopher to tell Dennis they had fallen in love. Augusten and Christopher will wed in 2013.
So what Burroughs was really seeking all these years was sobriety, stability, a husband, and long-term happiness or contentment, which is wonderful for Burroughs at age 50, but not very exciting for his audience. Hence the aforementioned mediocrity, both in tone and execution. Because Burroughs is always the outspoken raconteur, Lust and Wonder comes with his trademark humor (mostly in the Mitch section) and brutally frank observations though sparse self-reflection. It's sporadically well-written but hardly gripping, with the last third being totally predictable, probably fulfilling the worst assimilationist nightmares of same-sex marriage opponents. Gay readers might appreciate his dissection of falling in and out of love, and undoubtedly relate to staying in lousy, unfulfilling sexless relationships well past their expiration date, but whether they will care about the excessively meticulous plight of two wealthy middle-aged men living with their three dogs in a 200-year-old house in rural Connecticut, where Burroughs obsessively collects and sells expensive vintage and estate jewelry, is rather questionable. Also, this confession is worrying: "The manuscript for my current book was late. When I typed, only gibberish came out. But if I didn't turn in a manuscript, there would be no money." While fans will be pleased that Burroughs, after much travail, has found domestic bliss, overall Lust and Wonder is a disappointment. In fact, it lacks both lust and wonder.