The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux

Robert Leleux

"If David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs combined their talents, they might come up with something to match

Robert Leleux’s mesmerizing memoir.”

--BarnesandNoble.com

In January of 2008 a miraculous thing happened--the terrifc folks at St. Martin's Press published my first book, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, a comedy about the end of my teenage years and my parent's oh-so messy divorce. Since the publication, I've been all over the country on a bus & truck tour, of sorts, with my beloved mother--and her wardrobe, and her beauty treatments, and her wigs. And we have both loved every minute of it. Well, almost every minute. But, really, beyond that, it's been one of the most rewarding experiences in my life.

The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy

The Reviews...

"Head-tossing, high-strung comedy....theatrical flair and outlandish humor....superhumanly snappy....gallows humor with sprightly flair...artfully acerbic.”

--Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Teacher, freelance writer and first-time author Leleux proves he’s already a master of the snappy one-liner and the improbably hilarious in this rollicking, bitter-sweet (emphasis on the bitter) coming-of-age memoir. Featuring a larger-than life mother addicted to shopping and surgical makeovers, Leleux admits to having “tilted” the story so that it “reads better (as in funnier, or happier) than it was lived”; still, it’s a rocky trip that obviously required a highly evolved sense of humor to get through (fortunately, Leleux makes himself as big a target as his extravagant mother). Beginning with his father’s abandonment when Leleux was 17, the author traces the erratic aftermath in the home of his desperate mom, whose plan to remarry rich leads her to pursue a risky and exorbitant series of surgical enhancements, turning inside-out Leleux’s hope that “the end of marriage [would be] only the beginning of plastic surgery and happy new lives.” In the meantime, Robert meets and unexpectedly falls in love with Michael Leleux, learning for the first time that he’s gay and, further, that his mom has already known. Not for the timid, this laugh-out-loud tale of dysfunction and discovery is a compulsively readable treat; any fan of Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris owes it to themselves to pick it up."

--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This hilarious, heartbreaking memoir is a pure joyride for the reader."

--Susan Larson, The Times Picayune

”The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy [is] the utterly beguiling book-length debut by a young writer with voice enough for three boys....Leleux's book wears its heart on its sleeve. It is unapologetically witty, irreverent, a romp on paper...”

--The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Southern-fried Sedaris? Barbecued Burroughs? If you're going to be gay in Texas, it's probably best to have a sense of humor. Believe us, Leleux has a wicked one. Want to talk about your sordid, dysfunctional, and totally hilarious childhoods? Then y'all have come to the right memoir.

--B&N (Discover Great New Writers Program)

"[Molly] Ivins' subversive wit...in The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, Leleux's funny, smartly written coming-of-age story."

--The Houston Chronicle