Augusten Burroughs describes the difference between love and libido in his seventh autobiographical work, Lust & Wonder, which picks up where Dry left off, chronicling the raconteur's return to drinking and his exasperating search for a meaningful relationship.
There's Mitch, "a deeply odd" writer of one of Burrough's "favorite books," and then George, whose tragic demise unmoors Burroughs, leading him to excessive drinking, bouts of bed-wetting, and unquenchable gem buying sessions on QVC ( an experience that inspired the author's only published novel Sellevision in 2000 ).
Finally realizing his romantic feelings for his agent, Christopher, Burroughs is knocked further off course after Christopher reveals that he is HIV-positive. Determined to meet a man who is not "medically off limits," Burroughs, now sober, meets "normal and stable" Dennis on a popular dating site and they enter a years-long relationship in which they adopt dogs, build a home, and eventually realize they are no longer in love with each other.
"I felt like such an idiot staying in this relationship when all the road signs were telling me to take the next exit! Go now!" said Burroughs during a recent phone interview with Windy City Times. "We're told relationships are all about compromise—but how much of a compromise? I know I was compromising my whole life away and I kept thinking this was normal. I guess this is what people do. Could we have gone forever? I guess. We didn't scream and fight every day, but I just couldn't stay another minute."
In the book, Burroughs reveals that at the beginning of their relationship, the couple decided to wait to have sex because Dennis wanted feelings of love and affection to develop before hopping into bed.
"I don't know if that is still a good idea," said Burroughs. "Sometimes, sex is just sex. Maybe sex isn't so precious that it has to be placed in a blue Tiffany box and handed out later. I think about all the bad advice I've been given by therapists and others about sex and I'm just so wary about giving advice to other people, especially in this area. I'm not sure there is a hard and fast rule."
At one point, Burroughs realized Dennis was just as unhappy with the relationship, so he emailed his partner ( they were both home at the time ) and gently suggests he write him a letter explaining what is wrong.
"His response was a list, several pages long, of all the things he loathed about me," said Burroughs. "I asked myself do I really want to be with someone who merely tolerates me? Do I want to be with someone who kept this this long list of things about me, not sharing little grievances day to day, but has been stockpiling for the great apocalypse this list of features and traits in my personality that he can't stand?"
Dennis' potential reaction to this unflinching, public portrayal of their relationship didn't distract the memoirist from his writing process.
"You know, it's not a factor for me, said Burroughs. "We spent about 10 years together, so he knew how I wrote, he knew my writing style, he knew that I was very honest with myself and others, and he knew that I don't hold back. I've never allowed myself to focus on what other people are going to think— and that goes for readers as well, because it can be so distracting and I get paralyzed. I have to write for me and I guess that sounds pretty selfish— but it really is the only way to write material that has any chance of connecting with someone else. Because what people connect to is the scent of the truth—and you can only get that by being bluntly, brutally honest," he said.
As his relationship with Dennis continued to implode, Burroughs resisted his burgeoning feelings for Christopher because of his then-agent's HIV status.
"I was an asshole," said Burroughs. "It was understandable to a degree because I had lost someone in the '90s to AIDS when I was in my early 20s, and I was devastated by it and I just thought 'I don't want to go through that again.' I was young and stupid, I don't know how else to put it. I look back on the feelings that I had about dating someone who was HIV positive, and I realize that I hadn't examined that bias since I was in my 20s, and when I looked at it again, I thought, 'Oh, well actually, it's not that I don't care—I think it's amazing.' This guy has been HIV-positive since the fucking '80s—he has the one quality I admire the most in a person—he is an incredible survivor."
In 2013, Burroughs and Christopher eloped on April Fools Day, because—as he noted in an essay for the New York Times—"we are both fools." Their familial brood features three dogs including a puppy with floppy, Flying Nun Ears that Burroughs met at WGN-TV studios in Chicago while touring behind the paperback release of his self-help manual This is How: Surviving What You Think you Can't.
"I texted Christopher a picture of me holding this puppy in front of this huge image of Bozo The Clown, both of us with the same awkward expression on our faces and said, 'I've made this grave error. I think we should adopt this dog,' knowing full well he'd be like, yeah, right. And I don't think it was five minutes later that he texted me that Radar is coming on a plane and that I'm going to go pick him up at the airport," said Burroughs.
Burroughs spent a large part of his relationship with Dennis wondering, "Are you as happy as I am?" He no longer ponders the skewed mathematics involved in defining an equally happy couple.
"It is something I used to wonder about with Dennis—the equality of our love, this unknowable measurement," Burroughs said. "It just doesn't come up in my mind now with Christopher because my answer is already there. I can see the happiness on his face. Putting that love on a scale and weighing it is not only impossible, but beside the point."
Lust & Wonder, published by St. Martin's Press, is now available.
