He asked me if I’d be up for it and interested. And a couple of months after Kit died an editor from Simon & Schuster, who was an acquaintance of mine and had been following my posts, approached me. I’d been chronicling Kit’s illness, our battle, and our experience through the illness on Facebook. Where does the idea to turn that last year with Kit into a book come from?

Manuel Betancourt: Let’s start at the beginning. Over coffee and a bagel, we talked about how he decided to turn such painful memories into a book, why he didn’t feel the need to shy away from his and Kit’s imperfections (he’s candid about his partner’s indiscretions, his own insecurities, and the way couples’ therapy was a constant in their lives), and why the memoir works as a probing portrait of the perils of contemporary queer intimacy. Having followed Ausiello’s columns and scoops for years, I was all eager to sit down with him to discuss his most personal writing to date. Here was a man, after all, who had not only given his large rectal tumor a name (“The Lurker”) but had turned a two-inch campy retro B-movie monster figurine into its physical manifestation, one he placed on their coffee table facing a 99-cent store ceramic middle-finger statue right before heading to the hospital for his first treatment. In that, the book stays true to Kit himself. Just like its subtitle - “A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words” - Ausiello’s moving account of those final months together nakedly tackles the heartbreak of seeing your loved one ravaged by illness with humor and grace. Christopher “Kit” Cowan died in 2015 after battling a rare and aggressive form of cancer for close to a year. Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies (Atria Books, 2017) isn’t, as becomes clear, about Ausiello himself, but about his partner of more than thirteen years. Michael Ausiello, known to rabid television fans as the go-to person for any inside scoop on casting notices, behind-the-scenes tiffs, and shocking spoilers of your favorite shows, didn’t shy away from giving away the third act of his memoir in its title.

Michael ausiello memoir