The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy
by Robert Leleux
St. Martin’s Press. 288 pages, $23.95
“THERE IS no such thing,” Robert Leleux’s boisterous Texas mother, Jessica Wilson, once told him, “as a happy medium.” With a funny, hyper-campy yet rarely sentimental prose style, Leleux has written a tale about coming out in small-town America and his family’s made-for-TV foibles. Although Leleux’s tome is loaded with witty asides and snarky bits of sarcasm, his writing sometimes struggles to reach a happy medium between engaging the reader with down-home anecdotes and assaulting him with over-the-top scenarios until it’s just not funny anymore.
Following a durable and perhaps overused trend in memoir writing, Leleux has fictionalized various aspects of his upbringing for creative, comedic, and dramatic effect, with a result that often seems to wrap things up too neatly to be true to life. Indeed Leleux confides in a prefatory note that he has deliberately “corrected unbecoming camera angles, softened direct, overhead lighting, altered outmoded skirt lengths, and reduced early-morning, under-eye puffiness.”Not long after being abandoned for a homely-looking woman named Pam, Leleux’s mother—whose outsized Texas personality is matched by her glued-on blonde wig—decides to do what many women of a certain age who are depressed about a man resort to: change her appearance dramatically. So she hoodwinks the seventeen-year-old Leleux into driving her to the plastic surgeon for lip implants. Leleux, believing that his mother was, as she’d told him, bleeding from “down there,” rushes her off to Houston. In subsequent chapters, we’re treated to his mother’s newfound lisp (“Conthidering the men my new lipth will bring my way, Robert”), more about her wig (“It looked like a yellow Muppet was sitting on her head”), the time she vomited at the cheesy salon, and the time her lip implants popped out in an airport restroom.
Leleux was aware of being gay for awhile—but his official coming out was precipitated by falling in love the with dimple-faced Michael, who ostensibly was going to teach Robert how to dance. Coming to terms with his sexuality was “the ultimate frame of reference through which to view the rest of my life,” he writes, noting that it provided insights into his unique relationship with his mother.
The memoir’s conclusion takes us to Robert and Michael’s tiny Huntsville bungalow apartment, through Robert’s indoctrination into the ways of Michael’s large Catholic family, to Robert’s eventual scholarship and acceptance at Sarah Lawrence, and, finally—perhaps most poignantly—to his conversation with his long-despised father. Leleux claimed a kind of deep-seated hatred for his dad throughout the book, referencing the fact at various points that he’d never forgiven his father for abandoning the family and even harbored murderous fantasies. Michael demands that Robert call his dad as a graduation present; Robert consistently refuses, leading Michael to observe that he clings to his anger and “gets satisfaction out of having an outraged story to tell.” Leleux’s chat with his father enables him to break through the resentment that he’d worn as a coat of armor for years, allowing the story, like most coming-out narratives, to end on an upbeat note.
This memoir is syrupy, Southern, and chock full of homilies about the meaning of life. It’s also a decent first effort from Leleux, who could use more seasoning as a writer and the perspective that the passage of time will provide. It’s a redemptive tale told in a mostly fun, campy voice about the power of family ties and the fraught and special bond between a mother and her gay son.
____________________________________________________________________
Christopher Carbone, a writer based in Austin, has contributed to the The New York Observer, The Washington Post, and Tribeza.
