With the full-catastrophe honesty readers have come to expect, Augusten Burroughs launches into his latest memoir, “Lust & Wonder,” by slipping out of sobriety and into a cocktail then sending a proposition — which he knows flirts with a gray area between clever and creepy — to a friend of a friend.
His e-mail to this writer he admires includes a photo of himself with no shirt. “I probably sound crazy, like a stalker,” he writes. “Like a ‘fan.’ ”
Yet when he gets a quick response saying they should meet, “The swiftness and brevity of his reply caused me to instantly resent him.”
With this snark begins the first of three relationships Burroughs covers — in often funny but also embarrassing and painful detail, for both parties — in “Lust & Wonder.”
Burroughs has been taking these unflinchingly honest deep dives into his own neuroses for more than a decade. In the early years of his book-writing career (he worked in advertising first), he hammered out memoirs “Running with Scissors” (published in 2002) and “Dry” (2003), which cover his strange childhood and his journey to sobriety, respectively. (“Running with Scissors” shows the basis for a lifetime’s worth of psychological distress, but it’s not a prerequisite to his other work.)
In “Lust & Wonder,” Burroughs seeks love, and his ability to note and understand even his most warped inner workings translates into an ability to peer into the psychological underpinnings behind the behavior of his lovers, too. It works not just because it’s funny, but because it’s analysis with a big heart. It’s still uncomfortable when Burroughs writes about awkward sex or notes that his boyfriend Mitch has patchy fur rather than the full, gorgeous head of hair his Famous Author Friend has. But as readers we’re in on his self-awareness: Burroughs knows when he’s being mean and says so, and he includes himself in his warts-and-all memoir philosophy.
That lucid, often wrenching window into his humanity shows up in his therapist’s office, when he realizes he has spent far too long explaining a massive breakup-related downward spiral to his riveted psychiatrist. “I’m the one who said, ‘I think we ran over.’ ”
“When your psychiatrist forgets to look at the clock and is hanging on your every word, that’s when you know, out of all his patients, you are the sickest.”
His next relationship is longer and begins to feel like a protracted land battle — even though reading it, one senses the end is nearing and feels compelled only to stop turning pages to refill the popcorn. We’re along for the ride, we feel the dread and the tension, and we wise up as he does. It’s hard to know whether to be sad or angry or just laugh at boyfriend No. 2’s e-mailed list of things he hates about Augusten. But we saw it coming and feel smart for being able to say, Ah ha! Knew it!
That gained wisdom is one of the hallmarks of “Lust & Wonder.” Burroughs of course has the benefit of hindsight as he reflects on his wilder 1990s then his more stable years building a house in the ‘burbs. But he’s looking back with a fresh maturity in this memoir, and that lends weight to what happens next.
Love finally happens, but all isn’t perfect now — worst for readers is that he ends up blocked from writing and turns his attention to shopping online for rare gemstones and jewelry. It’s easy to question in the last pages whether a loving relationship can hold the tension to carry a story forward; broken relationships do this so easily. Still, at the closing lines of “Lust & Wonder,” I felt a warm rush of happiness for Burroughs and his husband, and because genuine feeling for and connection with the author is one of the reasons we read memoirs in the first place, this was a good takeaway.
But I also closed “Lust & Wonder” thinking that if he has another bout of writer’s block, I hope it doesn’t last long.
Jenn Fields: 303-954-1599, jfields@denverpost.com or @jennfields
