This memoir opens up with a question from one of the author’s friends, Bill: “Do you think you’re a nymphomaniac?” he asks. In case you’re wondering, no one ever asks me that. In fact, I’m pretty sure that none of my friends have been asked that recently, and that goes double for my friends who are ten and twenty years old than I am.
Naturally, I was fascinated from the get-go. After all, as a romance author, I spend an awful lot of time thinking about women’s sexuality and, in particular, their desire. But I’m pretty much limited to women in their twenties, with the occasional excursion into eighteen-year-old virgins and thirty-year-old widows.
Jane Juska was a retired schoolteacher when she placed the following ad in the New York Review of Books:
| Before I turn 67–next March–I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me. |
I want you all to go out and buy this book, so I won’t give away too much, let’s just say that she does get that sex. Lots of it. With various men, most of whom she likes. It’s fascinating, hilarious and sometimes hideously embarrassing (in romance, I’d compare it to one of the those sex scenes Susan Elizabeth Phillips does so well at the beginning of a novel, when it’s so bad that you’re cringing and mentally begging the heroine to leave the room).
The reason I made this a book club selection is that I thought it would be fascinating to see what everyone thinks of the book: of what she does, how it goes, and how the story ends. Second, if you were going to put up an ad akin to this, what would you say? And third, what does it say about women’s sexuality that no romances talk about sixty-seven year old women who want to have lots of sex, and aren’t afraid to advertise the fact?
See you on the Bulletin Board!
