Culture Watch
In this issue:
Catherine Ries reviews Jane
Juska's frank memoir of her late life search and adventure for romantic
attachments: A Round-Heeled Woman
The Yale Center for British Art is currently
hosting an exhibit entitled, Pieces Of Eden; Petra:
Lost City of Stone presents the ancient metropolis of Petra,
which was literally carved from the red sandstone in the harsh
desert cliffs of southern Jordan; Roaring
into the Twenties: The New New York Woman follows women
liberated from the Victorian age through the lens of the industries
that capitalized on this new freedom: fashion, entertainment,
health and beauty.
Books
A Round-Heeled Woman
a novel by Jane Juska
Villard, 272 pp
At the age of 66, Jane Juska
explored a sexual fantasy by running a personal ad in the New York Review
of Books. It read:
“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.”
The responses she received
were variously romantic, obscene, literary, and funny. After sorting
the letters into piles labeled “yes,” “no,” and “maybe,” she began an
adventure exploring her own sexuality, inner strengths, and insecurities.
Juska herself is not the
average woman. Into the stories of her late-life adventure she weaves
her relationship with her parents, her thirty years as a single woman
and single parent, and her struggles with substance abuse. Through it
all, she maintained her career as an English literature teacher and
volunteer prison educator.
Though Juska’s ad is on its
face an invitation for sex, clearly “a man I like” implies, for her,
a man with education, sophistication, and a broad background in literature.
She describes in some detail four relationships that arise from her
ad. The most entertaining encounter is her very first meeting: lunch
in a public place with a self-styled Irish life of the party. It was
not an auspicious beginning, and it is greatly to Juska’s credit that
she pressed on in her quest. Subsequent sexual partners, or at least
those that she chooses to tell us about, are all interesting men, each
with his own reasons for responding to her ad. Some of the men she refuses
to meet might have made an even better story. (Who was the “very famous”
man that she relegated to the “no” pile?)
Part of the fascination and
fun of the book is imagining how one might have done it differently.
Whom she chose to meet, what she chose to wear, how she arranged the
first meeting with each man is almost a reader-participation game. Where
she found the most satisfaction is a surprise, and an invitation to
a sequel.
Jane Juska is an intelligent,
thoughtful, and good humored writer, with a healthy recognition of her
assets and her liabilities. She demonstrates that sexuality doesn’t
have an age limit.
Culture Watch continued>>>
Catherine Ries is an attorney
in Modesto, California, representing children in dependency actions.
Her line of work makes her especially grateful for her two healthy teenagers
and her husband of 23 years. She spends her free time on the Russian
River north of San Francisco reading, writing, and kayaking.
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