Fake missed connections Divorce, online dating, and other failures : a memoir

Brett Fletcher Lauer

Book - 2016

"'Your wife is having an affair with my husband. It has caused some trouble in my marriage and I thought you should know.' One phone call in December 2005 begins the compelling, unpredictable story of Fake Missed Connections. A child of divorce with an already fragile sense of trust, Lauer unravels at the betrayal, begins divorce proceedings, and moves back to Brooklyn where he spends too much time alone, fixated on the idea that a murderer from 1898 might be haunting his apartment. Eventually, as he starts to peruse online dating profiles, he becomes obsessed with 'missed connections' precisely because they provide what online dating doesn't: a story. He begins writing phony missed connections to post on Craig...slist and, though he feels a stab of guilt when he posts them, he is hopelessly intrigued by the responses he receives. Real documents illuminate Brett's dating adventures, from love (and hate) letters and instant message conversations to Brett's online dating profile and wedding announcement. Fake Missed Connections is an unconventional yet deeply moving look at the modern search for love, the ways in which we fail to communicate, and the quest for a genuine moment of connection"--

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Review by New York Times Review

FOR PEOPLE STILL willing to get romantically involved with a Brooklyn writer, the poet Brett Fletcher Lauer's memoir, "Fake Missed Connections," may send them back to the shuffleboard bars of Gowanus for less troublesome freight. Lauer, the deputy director of the Poetry Society of America and author of the poetry collection "A Hotel in Belgium," begins his memoir with a ringing phone; the call (or, as he later refers to it, "The Phone Call") is from a woman he doesn't know, informing Lauer that his wife is having an affair with her husband. "Who was that?" Lauer's wife asks from the couch, and the memoir's first story line - an archaeological dig in the ground of marital infidelity and its aftermath - is underway. Lauer rifles through their apartment for evidence, fires off pained emails, writes letters to his estranged mother that he will never send, reads "the entire Internet" and downloads music to match his post-traumatic gloom. The memoir doesn't proceed as much as it accumulates in a kind of curated pastiche, like a Tumblr page in prose. Much of the correspondence in the book is based, we are told, on actual documents or on chat and I.M. transcripts, and these are interspersed with more traditional passages of personal narrative that revel in the awkward pungencies of life. Lauer battles a ghost in his apartment after he's settled in Brooklyn again, and he writes impressively about his adolescent fascination with the hard-core punk/Hare Krishna hybrid form of rebellion known as Krishnacore. Once Lauer takes a plunge into the online dating site Nerve - it's 2007, so this is before OkCupid and Tinder owned the market - the memoir starts using confession as a means to plumb the social mores, surface inanities and deeper dissatisfactions of the Internet's love economy. He writes his first dating profile with an assist from Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, and recognizes the irony when he's tagged by the site's algorithms as the "gentle artist" type. He meets Daphne and lets her down ("I was a little bummed that you said we might not hang out," she writes him at one point in chat-speak, "because I want to hang out"); then there's Bella and an extended debate about "exclusivity" and when it's all right to ask for it; and Lindsay, who asks Lauer to send her a nude photo, goes ballistic in an email and then uses their relationship as material for a standup routine she posts on her blog. Meanwhile, the undisguised longing he finds in the Missed Connections notices on Craigslist inspires Lauer to obsessively post fake ones, so much so that he starts borrowing friends' computers for their IP addresses. (Lauer's collaboration with Gretchen Scott, Ships That Pass, collects fake Missed Connections posts as an "online art project" on Tumblr.) The French artist Sophie Calle's installation "Take Care of Yourself" for the 2007 Venice Biennale is cited as an influence on the project (and on the memoir as a whole), but the stream of cultural signifiers throughout the book - Pitchfork, French-pressed coffee, Silver Jews, McCarren Park, "Veronica Mars," Bridget Jones, the Maggie Gyllenhaal film "Secretary," Lexapro and Wellbutrin - puts Lauer in the company of more twee conceptualists like Miranda July. It's fitting, then, that when Lauer finds true love again, he seals it with an icecream cake from Baskin-Robbins. The inscription: "Will you be my girlfriend?" I'd be more impressed if Lauer had avoided the teeth-corroding sweetness and used a line from Clarice Lispector instead: "Everything worthless in me was my treasure." It wouldn't make for much of an ice-cream cake, but it has a lot more to say about the vulnerability on display in Lauer's memoir and how he confuses it for literary art. BENJAMIN ANASTAS is the author of two novels and a memoir, "Too Good to Be True."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 13, 2015]
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The tale of how the author's wife's infidelity sent him into the brave new world of Internet dating. This memoir by Poetry Society of America deputy editor Lauer (A Hotel in Belgium, 2014) proceeds from a phone call he received from a woman who told the author that his wife was having an affair with her husband. Lauer found himself in emotional limbo, apparently more committed to repairing the marital damage than his wife was (she continued the affair), while feeling that the narrative thread of his life was unraveling. There are reasons to suspect he's an unreliable narrator or that there's a subtext to this memoir on the unreliability of all memory. The author delivers seemingly offhand disclosures of his neediness and depression, his alcoholism (in recovery), the lack of sex in their marriage, his wife's request that they seek counseling, and his refusal to get a driver's license after they moved (at her insistence) from New York to the Bay Area. So there are at least two sides to this story, but in this memoir, she is depicted only as the one who betrayed him. The women with whom he connects on the Internet (after returning to New York) are a series of all-but-anonymous names with whom he was seeking some sort of solace. As he writes to one (addressed "Dear You"), "with the illusion of the connectedness of the Internet I somehow knew you more than a complete stranger. But I guess that is true and not true." Much of the most emotionally powerful writing here comes in unsent letters to his divorced, alcoholic mother, from whom he's been estranged since she asked for a drink at his wedding. As for the title, the Missed Connections section on Craigslist suggests the pervasiveness of loneliness and longing and the desperation to connect. During his journey through online dating, Lauer offered women "the illusion that [they] could understand me," which he extends to readers as well. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.