Juska, Jane: A Round-Heeled Woman: My late-life adventures in sex and romance

[rachelmanija]

This memoir is about what happened after Juska placed this 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."

To my surprise and disappointment, only about half the book is actually about Juska's encounters with the men who respond to the ad. The rest is a more standard memoir about her childhood and life up to that point, which has some fascinating incidents but isn't what I most wanted to read about. I can see why her earlier love life was relevant, but she could have gotten in all the really important parts of her past in one quarter the amount of space she took to write about them. After recounting some hair-raisingly bad dates early on, including one in which a man decides to demonstrate his sense of humor by pretending to leap out of the window of the Zuni Cafe, Juska embarks upon a seemingly endless series of digressions into the past, leaving me reading with one eye peeking forward to see when she'd get back to the present again.

Juska has a strong narrative voice, literate, witty, and matter-of-factly sexy. I kept wanting to take her out for coffee and tell her, "You go, girl!" Though I wish her book was more focused, I did enjoy it and was glad to see that she did end up getting to have lots of sex with men she liked-- even if she got burned a fair amount along the way.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Agreed all the way on this one. I would have enjoyed it a great deal more if it had been more focused on what, according to all indications, was the premise; as it was, I put it back on the store shelf and shrugged. Certainly not a waste of time, but eh.

[literaticat.livejournal.com]

I liked the bits about her teaching in prison, actually. She seems like a cool old dame, and would probably be a fantastic dinner party guest.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I liked the teaching bits (the high school ones too-- I can't believe she confessed to ) but I think she could have told her family background in about two chapters. (Have you read Mark Salzman's True Notebooks, which is also about teaching in prison?)

[literaticat.livejournal.com]

I did. Also we did the Salzman with a mother-daughter book group, 14 year olds, they really liked it as well.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Aw, that's shame. I'd meant to check this out when it came out in paperback.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I think it's definitely worth a read, but maybe from the library.