The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy
by Robert Leleux
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,
that great representative of the American Literature canon, is especially
interesting to teach adolescents. Juniors in high school can completely
appreciate the title character’s intentions. Jay Gatsby is satisfied
with nothing less than creating and embodying what he considers to be the
perfect man. He defines this ideal creature according to symbols of wealth
and social power. Nick, the narrator, claims he appeared from nowhere and
took over an expansive and expensive mansion in Long Island. The problem
with living a life of fiction, as any teenager knows, is that there are
side effects to eradicating the real you—one of which is that facades
are often transparent to everyone but you. In other words, the fact that
you are always “on stage” is sometimes obvious to everyone.
Robert Leleux grew up in a Gatsby home,
only it was his mother who followed Gatsby’s path. She was a character
in her own right, a woman so dedicated to perfection that she caused
herself to go bald from bleaching her own scalp. Interestingly enough, the
situation didn’t faze her; she was so used to enhancing her look with
makeup, wigs, and falsies. A woman whose first attempt at creating wealth
and gaining power failed when her in-law-funded extravagance ended when
her penniless-on-paper husband left her, “Mother” picked herself up
and embarked on a multi-faceted plan to redirect her future. Robert, like
it or not, was along for the ride.
“Despite the fact that Pam was ugly,
knowing that Daddy had left her for another woman catapulted Mother into a
frenzy of beauty treatments, aerobic exercise, and various
self-improvement measures. She quickly became convinced that her only hope
of regaining financial comfort depended upon snaring a rich man before our
new poverty began to appear too desperate than obvious. Even though Mother
seemed a little berserk, I was grateful for her burst of new energy. It
was far preferable to the way she’d moped around the house after seeing
Pam […] After she saw Pam’s poochy stomach, Mother had abandoned
herself to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She spent her days in her big canopy
bed, wearing a dirty peignoir, watching her movie, and drinking vodka out
of Evian bottles.”
Robert, accustomed to cucumber sandwiches,
regular Neiman’s grooming, and Bette Davis impersonations, is a bit
shocked by his mother’s behavior but willing to follow along if it means
keeping him in his usual luxuries. Slowly, though, Robert realizes that
Mother’s plan to pass as a girl in her thirties (instead of her true
late 40s) is somewhat foiled by his teenage presence. When she forces him
to drive her on a wild two-hour ride to save her bleeding “thingy” and
then abandons him in a podiatrist’s office while she undergoes major
plastic surgery funded by pawned jewelry, he laments his own naiveté:
“’I’m working very hard,’ I said, ‘to decide whether or not
you’re having a nervous breakdown. Or if you’ve always been crazy, and
I’m just now waking up to it.’”
Leleux documents his crazy path in the wake
of his mother’s adventures in his new memoir, The Memoirs of a Beautiful
Boy. While it’s difficult to imagine someone living like this as
recently as the 1990s, Leleux rightfully earns his place by some of our
favorite wacky families: David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, and others.
Leleux is young for a memoir, only about thirty, but his voyage into
theatre provided him with his own escape that was worth juxtaposing with
Mother’s journey. Along the way, Leleux falls in love and finds himself,
even as she flounders.
He describes Mother as the type of person
who “spoke in quotable phrases, as though she intended her words to be
embroidered.” Leleux inherited her gift, albeit in a more positive way.
His memoir is as funny as Sedaris and Burroughs, and, like theirs, it’s
just as much due to his writing style as it is the events of their lives.
Even his coming out process was amusing because he recognized the
absurdity of Mother making it about her, rather than about him:
“’And nothing about this catches you
unawares?’ I asked. Because, honestly, I found Mother’s response a tad
bit lackluster.
‘Unawares, Robert?’ she said. ‘Look
at me.’ Mother’s real hair floated like she was underwater. The way
her eyeliner was smeared looked like she’d seen musket fire. ‘How
could you have been my child and not be gay? Women like me always have gay
children. Cher, Lana Turner, Queen Elizabeth. My God, look at Queen
Elizabeth.’”
As Robert progresses through the memoir,
the distance he places between himself and his mother eventually allows
him to appreciate her Gatsby-like quality, just like the unbiased Nick
Carraway, finding his own backbone in the process. Memoirs of a Beautiful
Boy, with Leleux’s talent for writing and slightly twisted (in a good
way) perspective, holds its weight in the narrow genre of gay-related
books that can appeal to a wide range of people.
Rebecca James divides her time between
Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she teaches and is a grad student, and
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where she reads books simply for pleasure. She
may be reached with comments and suggestions at jamesr@allentownsd.org.
|
Back to Top of Page 