Love Junkie
- Author: Robert Plunket (United States)
- Book type: American 1992 novel
- Publisher reissue: Penguin Modern Classics
- To be released: March 5, 2026
- Length: 272 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: £ 10.99 / £ 7.99
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Robert Plunket Love Junkie reviews and information
Whenever a review of Love Junkie, the 1992 new novel by the American writer Robert Plunket, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.
- “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)
- “Love Junkie is a comedy of manners with a time bomb ticking behind the curtain.” (The New York Times)
- “Hilarious, very sad, and constantly teetering on the brink of being genuinely offensive. But it isn’t offensive!” (Lauren Oyler)
Blurb of the Robert Plunket novel
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 in its full and naked glory.
Robert Plunket was born in 1945 in Greenville, Texas, but raised in 
Havana and Mexico City. After college he moved to New York and became Mr Chatterbox, the gossip columnist for Sarasota Magazine. He has published two novels, My Search for Warren Harding (1983) and Love Junkie (1992). He is retired and lives in a trailer park in Englewood, Florida, where he enjoys collecting old quilts and raising succulents from scratch.