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The Round-heeled Woman: My Late-life Adventures in Sex and Romance
Chatto and Windus (
13 November, 2003 )
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Who said Im past it?  |
Wonderful, I thought I was over the hill before I read "A Round-heeled Woman: My Late-life Adventures in Sex and Romance" but it made me realise just how much fun I should - could be having! I am just over seventy-eight years old and I know many people would be horrified to know Im still voracious in bed! But I have rediscovered the art of sex and romance, sometimes with other women!This book teaches us that age should be no barrier, Im just as much a goer as I was when I was twenty!
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Reality Television for the Literate  |
How does a person write a revealing memoir like this and still have the guts to go out in public? A Round-Heeled Woman reads like a personal diary. So I have to hand it to Juska, it took courage to write this book.I was expecting a light-hearted memoir of adventures and misadventures in dating, with the twist being that the heroine is 67 years old. This memoir is occasionally light-hearted, but more often depressing, when Juska reminisces about her lonely childhood, or her even lonelier marriage. And when she starts dating again, after placing the personal ad, well, sometimes, I just wanted to shake her. She goes out with a series of men who are unsuitable in one way or another. Married, loopy, or just plain bounders. But she gives every one a chance and then some. A Round-Heeled Woman is like watching reality television (but with an English degree), and I have no one to blame for reading it all the way through except myself. I just couldnt look away.
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Darby and Juska |
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I would very much like to think that meeting Jane Juska would be as challenging (...and rewarding?) as reading this book. Whilst I would question whether or not, on her own evidence, the author was actually seeking adventures in romance let alone sex; nevertheless the book is a warm, intelligent and humorous look at life both past and present.
Jane Juska dips into her past either to set the scene for her current situation or to explore her reactions to it. There is much to be made of a Californian scholar with all the psychological baggage (Hints of child abuse, loving parents with no tangible way of showing it, repressive/conservative community) one has come to expect of a West Coast inhabitant.
However ultimately the book is less about romance and sex than good old fashioned self discovery with a dash of "two fingers" at convention. For all that, Jan Juska has a wry humour, easy going writing style and an ability to hold this readers attention throughout.
The intriguing juxtapositioning of a woman with a newly rekindled appetite for sex meeting men of roughly her age who are impotent, dying or just plain desperate to prove themselves before succumbing to the ultimate reward of age is proof that feminism is alive and well in the land of its birth.
Whether we learn anything new about sex and romance in our twilight years is doubtful but, having found herself and largely come to terms with the outcome, I will continue to imagine that meeting Jane Juska would be a pleasure - to discuss literature of course over a glass of wine.
To paraphrase Jane Juska, the book fails to hit the G spot but is far better than ones own company.
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