The Family I Almost Had
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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.