Augusten is back! His last book, This Is How, was a departure from his usual genre (memoir) and style, and though I think I will forever love anything he ever writes, it was…well…not my fave. Lust and Wonder returns us to documenting his vulnerable, crazy, lovable, self-proclaimed wreck of a self.I was crushed to learn that his 10 year relationship with Dennis was wrought with tension and misgivings, and worse, the depletion of humor and intimacy (though I would honestly love to read Dennis’s memoir of the relationship). I was delighted by the emergence of his love relationship with Christopher, his agent and now spouse. In fact, I think I love Christopher myself, what with the constant good mood and belly laughing!A couple of gems:I painfully related to:“In my mind, I frequently see these movies of terrible things that may happen…I’ve never been able to stop the blockbuster disaster film from playing on an endless loop in my mind. I see the terrible coming, whether it is or not.”“So many years of anticipating disaster is exhausting. Though I have tried to train myself not to think this way, it never works, so plan B is to go ahead and think this way but then remind myself I’m wrong.”(Plan A and B are essentially cognitive therapy which I personally have not found helpful. I am currently on Plan Z: Zoloft has, thankfully, helped my endless loop become intermittent clips.)This was interesting:At one point, Augusten described the sudden realization of his feelings for Christopher after seeing a split-second picture of him on his computer.“First, I felt love. Second, it was like a fist had been jammed into my crotch and pressed against my balls, an ache. I felt ownership, primal, just a mouth going, “Mine, mine, mine.”I loved that—the knowing—in and of itself. But the interesting part for me was a couple of days later when I walked into the den and the same feeling (minus the balls) instantly overcame me when I saw the stack of books and writing work I’d left on the coffee table the night before. (My work will be writing, mine, mine, mine!)In fact, this is one reason I love Augusten Burroughs’s books. If I am not the deepest thinker, I FEEL. Augusten FEELS, and he tells it like it is. There is such relief in that.And then this was just hysterical:“Arriving in Amsterdam was disorienting. Everybody rides bikes everywhere, which I supposed was admirable and inspiring, but it felt like stepping into a buzzing haze of flying monkeys…Then there were the tangled, guttural vocalizations the Dutch people made to form their own private little language. Dutch isn’t easy for the outsider to learn, because it’s spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex. In order to make the correct sounds, you have to have quite a bit of phlegm at the ready, which is probably why everybody smokes. Nonsmokers can’t even understand Dutch, let alone speak a single word of it. The word for “hello!” is actually the noise you make when you clear your throat really hard before hurling out a loogie onto the ground. “Have a nice day” sounds exactly like someone choking on his or her own tongue.The smug Dutch learn three languages in school, because they know that nobody else in the world is going to speak their strangled and gasping mother tongue. They learn the extra two languages, I figured, to show off. I was onto them: in my experience, startlingly modest, peaceful people would do anything to get you to notice how startlingly modest and peaceful they were. The Dutch did not fool me any more than the Buddhists I’d known growing up in western Massachusetts. Give a Buddhist a vacuum cleaner and the very first thing he or she will do is run through the house with it sucking up all the spiders. Zen, my ass.”Bahahaha, I love you, Augusten. (And Christopher!)