Love Junkie by Robert Plunket

Publishes 5 March 
 
Mimi Smithers, forty-something housewife and aesthete manquée*, has moved with her Union Carbide husband from Tehran to Westchester. Life takes an unexpected turn when she meets Joel, a dazzlingly handsome porn star. Soon she tumbles down the rabbit hole of Manhattan and Fire Island society, helping glamorous Joel with his lucrative mail order business (signed photographs, used underwear, 'verbal abuse audiotapes'), and her real dreams and adventures begin.
 
A Madame Bovary for the heyday of gay New York, Love Junkie, first published in 1992, is reissued here by Penguin Modern Classics in its full and naked glory.
 
 
*having failed to become what one might have been
 
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'Love Junkie is a comedy of manners with a time bomb ticking behind the curtain.' - New York Times

'Hilarious, very sad, and constantly teetering on the brink of being genuinely offensive. But it isn’t offensive!' - Lauren Oyler

'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.' ― The Nation