Fake Missed Connections

by Brett Fletcher Lauer

Overview

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 Craigslist 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619027633
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/01/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	225
File size:	831 KB

About the Author

Brett Fletcher Lauer is the deputy director of the Poetry Society of America and the poetry editor of A Public Space. His debut collection of poems, A Hotel in Belgium, was name a Top 40 Book of 2014 by Coldfront Magainze. He is the co-founder of Ships That Pass, an online art project of fake missed connections written by notables like Lena Dunham, Emma Straub, and Paul Legault, among others. The L Magazine named him one of five Brooklyn writers to watch. He is the Poetry co-chair for the Brooklyn Book Festival and lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

2015-10-04
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.

Kirkus Reviews