I placed my hand against the side of his precious, electric face and felt the stubble beneath my fingers. I was overwhelmed with the lust and wonder of it all.I've read plenty (not all) of Augusten Burroughs' work, and I've always found his voice to be so likeable and engaging that the actual substance doesn't matter that much (although I can't deny that I've been long fascinated by his incredible stories). Now fifty, Burroughs brings us his seventh memoir with Lust & Wonder, and The Washington Post is probably not wrong to ask, “For whom, exactly, are these many memoirs being generated?” Well, I guess the answer is me: I'm not a People Magazine-subscribing, TMZ-watching consumer of celebrity gossip, but gossip is not what Burrough keeps offering; reading these memoirs is like catching up with an old friend, and like with any old friend, I'm primarily interested in the answer to, “Have you been happy?” Lust & Wonder doesn't offer the blackly comic shocks of Running with Scissors or the grit of Dry, it doesn't even have the Aha! missing-piece-of-the-puzzle feeling of reading A Wolf at the Table. But after “knowing” Burroughs for years and growing to like him and wanting him to be happy, I was pleased to read this book and learn that, yes, he seems to have found his happiness at last.
My childhood had been hijacked by drunks, pedophiles, lunatics, and surrealists, so I grew up in a world unrelated to the actual planetary body beneath my feet. I was at the mercy of the off-the-rails adults around me. The upside was, I became determined as an adult to do what I wanted: become an author, get published, become sober, get love. Security and love, these were the two things I did not feel as a child, so I chased after them now, sometimes bumping into things and knocking them down in the process. I was an emotional Great Dane, hugely needy and clumsy.Lust & Wonder picks up where Dry (released in 2003) left off: In a serious but essentially sexless relationship with a semi-famous author (Mitch), and thinking he could master his alcoholism (through controlled overdrinking), Burroughs goes on his last bender while obsessively churning out what would become his first book, the novel Sellevision. The more he wrote (an act he hadn't known himself to be capable of), the less he drank, and by the end of mere weeks, Burroughs was single, sober, and in possession of a manuscript. After many rejections, Burroughs finds a literary agent (Christopher – a man for whom he felt an immediate attraction, but since Burroughs had recently lost his first great love to AIDS, he determined the HIV-positive Christopher to be off limits for his too-tender heart), and through an online personal ad, he found Dennis: the paragon of security and love that Burroughs had been seeking his entire life.
The decade they spent together is the bulk of this book, and although these must have been some happy years – with the couple building their dream home in the country, Dennis quitting his job to become the writer's business manager, Burroughs enjoying undreamed of success while putting down roots and adopting dogs – this relationship is also essentially celibate; Burroughs' frigidity attributed to his childhood sexual abuse. By the end of their time together, it's obvious that neither of the pair is happy.
I believed he loved the life we built, the oil-bronze-finish door pulls, the closets filled with linens, the cars. I definitely felt our life would be perfect for him if only I wasn't in it.At the same time, Burroughs realises that he had been in love with Christopher from the beginning, and as they had become best friends through the years, the way was paved for them to enter an intensely loving relationship; Burroughs can be his own neurotically bitchy self and Christopher has the ability to laugh off anything. And for the first time in his life, Burroughs discovered satisfying and loving sex; he had finally found his happiness and, just as though he had been an old friend of mine, I was glad to hear it.
On the other hand, I was surprised to read that Burroughs was essentially broke after the split with Dennis: Dennis was given half of Burroughs' publishing rights when they entered their romantic/business partnership, and after building the luxurious country home and indulging his obsessive rare gems/jade buying compulsion for years, Burroughs was told to write another book if he wanted to remain solvent. And yet, with his newfound happiness, Burroughs was suddenly unable to write; he claims to have penned two mediocre novels that aren't fit for publication in this time, and that he remained uninspired until he began work on Lust & Wonder. Happy lives probably don't make for interesting memoir, and the final passages of this book – where Burroughs goes on about his gems and jade and dogs – bears that out, but even if he wrote this book because he needed the money (and that fact makes me a bit sad: how is so successful an author not beyond money worries?), I'm still glad that he wrote it and that I read it.
