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(More customer reviews)For decades, the personals section of _The New York Review of Books_ has been a cheerful island of sexuality within an august intellectual setting. Those of us who browse it out of curiosity rather than sincere shopping can't help but wonder how these attempts at finding love turn out. Will the beautiful, brainy SJF, earthmother, find her sweet, brilliant, companionable sexy beast? Will the adventurous, intellectual, DWM, 47, periodontist, photographer, musician, cat-lover find his full-figured woman for passionate sex and scintillating discussions? (I am citing real ads from a recent issue.) Thanks to Jane Juska, we know, quite thoroughly, how one of those ads played out. Juska was watching an Eric Roehmer film in Berkeley, carefully munching her malted milk balls, when she started writing her ad. Carefully budgeting the $4.55-per-word prose, she eventually submitted, "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." Her funny, revealing, and smart book, _A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance_ (Villard), shows that the old slogan is quite true: it pays to advertise.
If you are not "of a certain age", Juska's title might elude you. It is an old phrase that indicates a woman who is easy to get to go from vertical to horizontal. "My heels are very round," she writes, "I'm an easy lay. An easy sixty-seven year old lay. 'Twas not always so." She had gone through decades of not having a man in her life. This is not just a story of what happened once she placed her ad, but also a memoir of her life so far that led to its placement. She recounts a Midwest upbringing, sad marriage, divorce, single motherhood, teaching high school (and prison) English, her love for the novels of Anthony Trollope, and much more. Of course the main fare is how Juska managed her respondents. She triaged the letters into Yes, No, and Maybe, stacks that proved not to be rigid. Her first encounter, filled with all the worry that would do justice to any virginal adolescent, could not have been worse; the cad had sent an outdated photograph and steals her champagne flutes and her pajama bottoms. Good writing paid off for another: "... a varied syntax sends shivers up and down my spine." She fell in love with a man who only wanted a friend. She had completely successful encounters with a man who was thirty-five. He wrote her that he realized "that there is a somewhat substantial age gap between us (not quite Harold and Maude, but in the neighborhood)" but that age didn't matter for people that mattered to him. He sounds too good to be true, but there isn't any disillusionment at the book's end.
There has already been backlash about the book; many would have been better pleased if she had followed the path old ladies are supposed to take and did not admit to any lingering libido. Of course, then there would not have been any book, and then there would not have been as happy and as fulfilled an author. Most readers will be rooting for her, as she grins against the disappointments life and men inevitably hand her. She cannot help loving them, and enjoying in particular their legs, buttocks, and penises, about which she writes with gusto. She may be needy, but she is also frisky and honest. She is neither noble nor pitiable, but simply reluctant to let physical thrills be a part of the past, something that only young people savor. She is brightly appreciative of the intellectual thrills of meeting interesting men, too. This is a unique memoir by a funny and irrepressible lady, and a sexy one as well.
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