Description
The “diabolically clever, shamelessly brass-balled, wrenchingly funny” (NY Native) story of love, lust, and the agony of romantic disillusionment.
Adored by the likes of Amy Sedaris, Madonna (who optioned the film rights), and Gordon Lish, Love Junkie is Robert Plunket’s cult novel of the heady heyday of gay New York at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic: scandalously long out of print, it is now gloriously reissued for a new generation of readers.
Mimi Smithers, a modern-day Emma Bovary, is a fortyish suburban housewife who has an eye for décor and dreams of hosting lavish cocktail parties. Reflecting on her time in Tehran with her Union Carbide executive husband, she says, “In the waning months of the Shah’s regime, entertaining became more and more difficult. Hams—always a problem in Islamic countries—were as rare as hen’s teeth.” After their move to Westchester, a party she hosts for Mrs. Rockefeller goes south, and she falls into a deep funk. But then life takes an unexpected turn when she stumbles down into the gay rabbit hole of Manhattan and Fire Island society and meets Joel, a porn star with a chest “as smooth as a Ken doll.” Soon she’s helping him with his lucrative mail order business (signed photographs, used underwear, “verbal abuse audiotapes”), and her real dreams and adventures begin.
Reviews
"Eager to please and gleefully tasteless." — Ed Park, Bookforum
"A comedy of manners with a time bomb ticking behind the curtain." — Jay McInerney, The New York Times
"Plunket’s novels delight in camp, they slice with merciless social acuity, they reject tidy explanation… For readers who want to feel something, rather than be told what to feel, this sort of nostalgia is our best bet—and there’s no better place to start than Love Junkie." — Reece Sisto, The Baffler
"One of the tragicomic classics of the AIDS era. In a groovier universe, Plunket would have gone on publishing novels in addition to his journalism… As it is, the strength and singularity of the two books he did publish demand an accounting of their place in the American fiction of the 1980s and ’90s." — Kate Wolf, The Nation
"Hilarious, very sad, and constantly teetering on the brink of being genuinely offensive. But it isn’t offensive!" — Lauren Oyler
"As beloved as it is controversial, Plunket’s 1992 cult novel will get a much-deserved second life thanks to this reissue by New Directions. (Maybe this will finally galvanize Madonna, who once optioned the film rights, to finally make that movie.)" — Daniella Fishman, The Millions
"Part of what feels so notable about Plunket’s writing is that it expresses a gay or queer sensibility through a lot of different, complementary emotional registers." — Brandon Sanchez, New York Magazine
"One of America’s funniest, gayest writers." — Casey Cep, The New Yorker
"It’s rare for a long-forgotten writer into his eighth decade to get rediscovered. What’s even more unusual about Plunket, and his unlikely return, is how stealthily influential his fiction has been over the decades." — Alexandra Alter, The New York Times
"Robert Plunket—formerly of New York, currently of Florida—may be on the heels of becoming actually famous with this reissue of his 1992 novel." — Dilara O’Neil, Vulture
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