24-6-2006

 

JANE JUSKA

 

Another page on this author, here                 

  

 

Required reading

Not dead yet, still dead sexy

Belle de Jour is cheered by the message in Jane Juska’s Unaccompanied Women – that a good love life is not just for the young or the beautiful

 

UNACCOMPANIED WOMEN
by Jane Juska
Chatto, £12.99; 272pp

FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS, Jane Juska’s memoir, A Round-Heeled Woman, has occupied pride of place in my house — in the bathroom, alongside Middlemarch and a stack of back issues of 2000AD. Even five years after its publication, the subject matter still has the power to shock.

Visitors chez Belle who dip into my now-faded copy come out of the toilet red-faced with excitement, exclaiming for the rest of the night “Wrinkly sex!” Most certainly: by the last page of the book, Juska is starting a very sexual relationship with a man less than half her age (72). A man who is highly intelligent. And who has a great cock.

Wrinkly sex, indeed. That horror is the barrier that Juska has obliterated, first with Round-Heeled and now with her new memoir, Unaccompanied Women, which proves that she isn’t the only woman pensioner to want a little sexual healing. It’s a necessary lesson in a world where 60-year-old pop singers marry thirtyish models and people pretend to be shocked only when it ends, but a film about a thirtyish woman dating a man ten years her junior is viewed as comedy. We still do not expect women to have sexual urges past the first flush of youth — if at all — much less when they’re prime candidates for hip replacements.

Juska was born a Midwesterner, buttoned-up and virginal even after marriage and children, but her heart is truly on the coasts of America: in California, where she lives, and in New York, where her lovers live. She spends all her money on seeing these men, and with good reason. She wants the gift of the male gaze, which sees everything about a woman but is at the same time less judgmental than we are about ourselves. She relishes the vicarious confidence she gets from watching a flat-stomached lover leap naked out of her bed.

The book starts with a summary of the last memoir and covers what happened afterwards. Well, what did happen? Juska’s 32-year-old lover let her down, and her book could not find a publisher. Then it did and she became something of a celebrity to her neighbours and for older women.

Her experiences make her bolder. She sees how love and sex make a woman beautiful, even when the belly has long since descended past the pubic hair. She talks to people of all ages: a beautiful mistress in her fifties who had an orgasm only after she divorced; a 27-year-old who gets up before her lovers so that they never see her without make-up; a Nordic goddess who steals the man that Juska loves. The men who hang around after her book signings, hoping for a tryst with this newly minted “sexpert”. Mostly, instead of taking up their offers, Juska goes home alone and wonders why the men she wants live thousands of miles away. She begins to ask for what she really wants – lots of sex with a man she likes — rather than just accepting what she can get. Considering that most women think that they will have to “settle” if they are still single at 30, this is groundbreaking.

Juska, a retired teacher, has much to teach us. What she uncovers, among other things, is that men are always men: laughably bad at deception, playing games long past their sell-by date, and wonderfully loveable. When her young lover finally comes out of oblivion to apologise for the way that he treated her – having bloodlessly shattered her hopes with the most anonymous of e-mails – how can she not forgive him? But what she teaches about women is far more important. Anyone perusing contemporary nonfiction might think that postfeminism has decomposed into two camps: the sex workers and those who disapprove. Juska bridges the gap, not only with her love of literature and of other human beings, but also by being dead sexy. She proves, most emphatically, that good sex is not the preserve of the ultra-rich or the ultra-beautiful. (If it were, most of us would not be here.) Juska represents the silent majority of older women: late bloomers, perhaps, over-educated, definitely; but still vital and in need of a good shag. It’s easy to sneer at our hyper-sexualised culture, to call any public acknowledgment of physical needs degrading and traitorous to other women, but only if you grew up privileged enough to choose a different route. Women like Juska did not have a choice. They look at the world as it is now and, rather than judge, ask themselves, why can’t I have some of that? Haven’t I played by the rules long enough? If only Ariel Levy and Maureen Dowd could live a month in her body. As one of Juska’s neighbours in Berkeley says, don’t ever leave . . . we need you.

This is why Juska’s books will always be on public display at my home. Ageing gracefully is not about the sexless dementia-lite ramblings of so-called angry old women on television. Nor is it about taking your moral and intellectual superiority to the grave. Juska is living the final decades of her life with a true disregard for convention. This is what being a grown-up is about: learning how not to care what other people think. It gives me hope.

EXTRACT
from UNACCOMPANIED WOMEN
by Jane Juska

It is our generation — Meredith’s and mine — the one that grew up in the Fifties, that is silent about sex. Like girls of our time, we never even mentioned sex except obliquely, and Meredith was very good at oblique. She was a great literary gossip: She knew all the dirt of the literati, such as that Simone de Beauvoir shacked up with Nelson Algren in Chicago, then returned to her celibate life with Sartre. And she did it more than once, sort of like going to camp in the summer. I listened intently as Meredith told me that on his wedding night John Ruskin screamed in horror at the sight of his wife’s naked body, and that Dante Gabriel Rossetti dug up his wife’s body to reclaim the poems he had put into her coffin on her death. And that Tennessee Williams was gay. “He is not,” I said. “Look at all those manly men in his plays, look at Stanley Kowalski!” “Oh, Jane,” sighed Meredith, exasperated over my stubborn naiveté, “only a writer in love with other men could create those characters.” We giggled over the gossip and the people who lived in it, but we were careful never ever to connect anything they did to our own lives; we never explored what they did, we just guessed and kept our guesses to ourselves. For Meredith and me it was as if we weren’t having sex, though both of us were, Meredith with a married man, I with Jack, both relationships headed for disaster. 

 

 

 

 

June 17, 2006

 

CHATTO & WINDUS £12.99 (253pp) £11.99 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

Unaccompanied Women, by Jane Juska

A room, not a man, of her own

By Emma Hagestadt

Published: 16 June 2006

Since the publication of her memoir A Round-Heeled Woman, Jane Juska can't leave her Berkeley home without being accosted by elderly fans. Embraced on the sidewalk, hailed from golf buggies, this Californian teacher-turned-writer has become an unlikely "sex guru" for a generation of wrinkly, but irrepressibly randy, baby boomers.

Juska's story began in 1999 when she placed an ad in the personal columns of 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": 63 replies were followed by a string of hot dates, literary foreplay and plenty of hit-and-miss sex. The resulting book was notable not only for its frankness about the mechanics of senior love, but the author's honesty about her need - indeed longing - for a physical relationship.

The sequel, Unaccompanied Women, describes her reinvented life as a 72-year old "sexpert". As she searches for the perfect rental property (she lusts after her friends' homes), man-hunting proves no less problematic. Graham, the 32-year-old who won her heart, gets married to a woman his own age. Robert, her second favourite date, runs off with her friend Ilse. John, her part-time New England lover, decides a bi-coastal romance won't work. Juska is left trying to gauge the nutter-quotient of the men who linger at the end of her book signings.

Juska's work has been hailed as taboo-busting, but this isn't the life-affirming read you might expect. Her lonesome kvetchings are enough to leave singletons, of whatever age, a trifle blue. When asked how to meet men, Juska ruefully admits her only advice is to "go online". Life, she concludes, is random, and romance and sex fleeting. Older women will always be marginalised. It's only now, she says, that she understands the last line of The Mayor of Casterbridge: "Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."

Juska's brave, if occasionally self-consciously bookish, narrative offers insights but no real solutions. At 72 she finds herself back in teen-mode pining for the unattainable, and self-evidently twattish, Graham - or, as he calls himself, "Abelard". Post-breakup tristesse aside, her late-life sexploits have not been in vain. By the end of the adventure, she's finally able to afford a room of her own.

Since the publication of her memoir A Round-Heeled Woman, Jane Juska can't leave her Berkeley home without being accosted by elderly fans. Embraced on the sidewalk, hailed from golf buggies, this Californian teacher-turned-writer has become an unlikely "sex guru" for a generation of wrinkly, but irrepressibly randy, baby boomers.

Juska's story began in 1999 when she placed an ad in the personal columns of 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": 63 replies were followed by a string of hot dates, literary foreplay and plenty of hit-and-miss sex. The resulting book was notable not only for its frankness about the mechanics of senior love, but the author's honesty about her need - indeed longing - for a physical relationship.

The sequel, Unaccompanied Women, describes her reinvented life as a 72-year old "sexpert". As she searches for the perfect rental property (she lusts after her friends' homes), man-hunting proves no less problematic. Graham, the 32-year-old who won her heart, gets married to a woman his own age. Robert, her second favourite date, runs off with her friend Ilse. John, her part-time New England lover, decides a bi-coastal romance won't work. Juska is left trying to gauge the nutter-quotient of the men who linger at the end of her book signings.

Juska's work has been hailed as taboo-busting, but this isn't the life-affirming read you might expect. Her lonesome kvetchings are enough to leave singletons, of whatever age, a trifle blue. When asked how to meet men, Juska ruefully admits her only advice is to "go online". Life, she concludes, is random, and romance and sex fleeting. Older women will always be marginalised. It's only now, she says, that she understands the last line of The Mayor of Casterbridge: "Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."

Juska's brave, if occasionally self-consciously bookish, narrative offers insights but no real solutions. At 72 she finds herself back in teen-mode pining for the unattainable, and self-evidently twattish, Graham - or, as he calls himself, "Abelard". Post-breakup tristesse aside, her late-life sexploits have not been in vain. By the end of the adventure, she's finally able to afford a room of her own.

 

 

THE SATURDAY READ

A woman's quest for intimacy, the sequel

Unaccompanied Women Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate Jane Juska Villard: 260 pp., $23.95

By Heller McAlpin
Special to The Times

June 10, 2006

IN late 1999, Jane Juska, a retired, long-divorced schoolteacher living alone in a rented cottage in Berkeley, placed a personal ad in the New York Review of Books that has since become famous: "Before I turn 67 — next March," the ad ran, "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 California woman received more than 63 responses to her ad, and had affairs with men ranging in age from 32 to 72. She kept a diary of her bold exploits, which she milked for her first book, "A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance." The tale of her elder-quest for intimacy brought notoriety and success, even landing her on "Oprah."

Three years later, Juska is attempting to extend her 15 minutes of fame with a follow-up volume explaining how her first book changed her life. "Unaccompanied Women" is a depressing read on several counts, not least of which is that she has barely enough material to merit a magazine article, never mind a sequel.

Although Juska's plucky gambit opened up her life, at 73 she is still lovelorn and searching frustratingly for intimacy. She yearns for her 30-ish paramour, dubbed "The Young One" by her readers; but Graham, alas, has married a younger woman — just a few years younger than he, but 40 years younger than Juska.

Also sobering are Juska's descriptions of the lonely women who flock to her readings, seeking inspiration and tips on finding love with the proper stranger. She writes that when she "began these readings, in June of 2003, I would leave burdened with the responsibility of having opened a great big kettle of fish. Women whispered their longings, their sins, their failures, their hopes for a better future."

Thrust into the uncomfortable position of sexpert, Juska feels at a loss. The trouble with giving someone the pulpit is that they think they must preach, whether or not they have something valuable to say.

Against her better judgment, she recommends online dating, something that she avoids as too risky. To underscore her point, she tells a creepy tale about online identity theft, then tries to balance it with the neighbor who "hit a home run. She just married a man she met online. He lives in Germany and she lives here, and he is coming here when the papers get done, and in the meantime she went there to get married to him. Isn't that nice?"

On the bright side, Juska realizes that her story "seems to have given many people hope." She describes some of the unaccompanied women she meets in her new role as spokeswoman for senior sex.

At a dinner with a wealthy Iranian divorcée and several divorced Muslim friends, she notes: "The yearning for a sweet man, a kind man, fills us and the air around us, and we grow quiet." On the other hand, heavy-breathing men call her unlisted phone number or loiter at the end of book signings to offer themselves.

The teacher in her revels in leading group discussions about casual sex (no sex is casual for her, she says) or whether it is possible to love more than one man at a time (yes, definitely).

Juska's voice, so bracingly fresh in her first book, veers close to whining when she pines over men and the dearth of affordable real estate in her increasingly pricey neighborhood.

Yet she remains sanguine about aging and offers a funny riff renaming its stages after periods in art history: 50 to 60, Baroque; 60 to 70, Surrealist; 70 and over, Masterpiece. She compares loving Graham to renting ("You know you don't have many rights … you could be ousted at any time"), and then comments wryly in the book's best line, "Of course, life itself is a great big rental."

"A Round-Heeled Woman" struck a chord with readers because Juska dared to write openly (even graphically) about her late-life pursuit of intimacy, becoming in the process a "septuagenarian sex symbol."

In "Unaccompanied Women" she confesses that she is "as desirous of touch as when I wrote the infamous ad," but is "sitting out a few innings" and living on memories while her broken heart mends. Bench-warming unfortunately makes for less scintillating reading than playing the field.
 

Heller McAlpin is a critic whose reviews have appeared in Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle and a variety of other publications.

 

 

The plight of an ageing sensualist
(Filed: 03/06/2006)


Frances Wilson reviews Unaccompanied Women by Jane Juska.

 

In case you missed it, in 1999 Jane Juska, a former teacher living in California, placed an 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.' For those well versed in the jargon of the personals, the superiority of Juska's wording is immediately evident and for those who read her account of what happened next - more Joanna Trollope than Anthony - these were probably her finest two sentences.

Nevertheless, the words Juska and trollop will now always be associated: 63 envelopes landed on her doormat, followed by a lot of sex and a kiss-and-tell memoir called A Round-heeled Woman ('round-heeled' is American slang for an easy lay), which sold by the truck-load on both sides of the Atlantic.

Juska has now produced a sequel, Unaccompanied Women, in which she describes what life has been like in her present guise as a notorious 72-year-old 'sexpert'. Since her book things have gone roughly like this: she lives in a rented cottage which is too small, which she cannot really afford, and thinks at any moment she is going to lose; she is still on the hunt for sex and romance but cannot find anyone sexually compatible and six-foot tall within a 3,000 mile radius; she is still in love with Graham, the thirty-something intellectual from New York who stole her heart in A Round-Heeled Woman, Graham gets married to someone else; her friend Ilse ran off with Robert, with whom she was also in love, Robert dies; she is besieged by phone-calls at all hours of the day and night by men and women alike who want to thank her for changing their lives; and whenever she gives a reading she will be told another extraordinary story by an ordinary person who has watched her body shrink and crease and fold in on itself while she still longs to be touched.

Juska's prose style is jovial, unembarrassed, and a tad pretentious, which gives you some idea of what she would be like in bed or at least what she would be like over dinner. She is a good companion, but a one-trick pony. Her line is that life is cruel to the sensuous woman past a certain age, and while this is undoubtedly true there is a limit to which not-getting-enough-sex is an interesting enough subject on which to meditate for 250 pages.

She was more fun before. The problem boils down to one of gender and not age. Love, as Byron put it, 'is to men a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence', and even at 72 some women have a problem in distinguishing life-long love from a one-night stand. What makes Unaccompanied Women a powerful read - and it is one of those books you never forget - is not the fact that Juska is dealing with a taboo subject or that she is a ballsy dame, but how vulnerable she turns out to be.

She is howling throughout: for the loss of Robert, the loss of Graham, the loss of Ilse, the silence of her phone, the emptiness of her email inbox. Her previously dull but contented celibacy has turned into a life of disappointment and longing. The journey she began with Trollope has concluded with Hardy. Only now, Jane Juska writes, does she fully understand the conclusion to The Mayor of Casterbridge : '…happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.'

 

 

Suitors call, they bore, they send vibrators

(Filed: 25/06/2006)

I got pretty cross with many reviews of Jane Juska's first autobiographical account of her brave quest for romantic and sexual stimulation in her late sixties. Many analyses of A Round-Heeled Woman ended with such lines as: "it's clear that her real passion is literature".

After years of celibacy and single motherhood, 19th-century novels and chamber concerts, she knows the anatomy of the arts fairly intimately. But a Schubert quartet will never hold you to its warm shoulder; not even the most sensuously bound edition of the collected works of Shakespeare will make you a giggling, burned breakfast.

And, as a woman who spent her twenties completely single, with my head in a book, and who is now happily shacked up, I know the great thing is that the real-life experience makes your engagement with the art infinitely stronger and more forgiving. I'm consequently very forgiving of spiky, needy, funny and frank Juska.

When she placed her advertisement 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"), she was crisply expressing her craving for something more than girl-on-page action. And she got it.

She met lunatics. She got dumped. She experienced intimacy at the gentle hands of Graham, a New Yorker half her age. And I think, after years of emotional connections made at a carefully edited distance, she loved the sense of surrendering herself to the unpredictability of her own - and other people's - passions.

Her follow-up book, Unaccompanied Women, deals with the aftermath. Juska is still single, fairly broke and searching for commitment. Here is a woman in her early seventies learning the lessons most modern women learned 50 years earlier. She feels jealousy and abandonment, with stored-up teenage intensity. Her expectations, she acknowledges, are ridiculously high. It's weird reading about her shock when (as we readers all fully expect) young Graham gets married to a woman half her age. We all think she should have known better. At any age. But we appreciate her honesty. It's what she feels, and she writes it sharply, rawly, truly.

What's harder to understand are her problems with female friends. An old pal dumps her when she ditches a planned girlie holiday for a lakeside bonkathon with Graham. It's true that the female code of friendship requires that the people who have always stood by you demand precedence. But it's understandable that Juska thinks her late-flowering and long-standing loyalty means the code can be adapted, and her friend sounds like a former glam girl who doesn't like her dumpy mate getting a shag. Another friend hooks up with Robert, with whom Juska fell in love before he jilted her.

It's difficult, too, to take Juska's meanness towards her "boring" fans. I cringed for the woman she met in a hotel bar, who gets the full works here. Juska says she told the poor woman to go out and buy her books. I only hope she doesn't identify herself (though it would be hard to see how she wouldn't). Other, more adoring fans gush over the way Juska has inspired them. It's nice to hear, and Juska is cool about not wanting to take credit, or present herself as a "sexpert".

Suitors call. They bore. They send vibrators. And Juska is still alone, with her rental cottage at the whim of new landlords. She wonders if her cultured and conversational New York men have spoiled her. She reminisces about college days she spent "unpinned".

She drinks and covets the lives of cheated-on wives: "It must be that not having sex with your husband makes you holy or something; in my experience, an asexual wife gets to live the life of a decent, God-fearing American, which, by crikey, appeals more and more to me as I see the possibility of such a life disappearing down the drain."

She remembers thrusting dollars into the G-strings of male strippers. She wants older women to express "something about the vibrancy that remains in old age, the usefulness of us, the love in us, and yes, desire".

Near the end of her book she is still asking the same questions all women ask themselves on dates. What will I wear? Will he ask me to sleep with him? Will I have to imagine my life without him?

What I enjoyed about both of Juska's unusual books is that here is a woman still searching for her "real passion". I wouldn't want to mess with her. I hope she finds it.

 

 

 

Literary Review

   

 

 

Virginia Ironside

SEPTUAGENARIAN SEX

Unaccompanied Women
By Jane Juska

Chatto & Windus 253pp £12.99)

As this is a book about a book, in order to get through this one, you need to have waded through the first one: Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. In this, the author recounted what happened after she’d placed an advertisement in the New York Review of Books which 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.’ Billed as a strike for sexual freedom for the mature (actually very mature) woman, it came across as a tragic wail from someone who was young in the Fifties but who clearly wished she’d been young in the Sixties.

As a result of the ad, Jane managed to get quite a few orgasms under her belt but oh, what a price she had to pay! Eighty-two-year-old Jonah, for example, insisted she talked dirty the first night and, on the second, announced that he didn’t desire her – ‘Get yourself some KY jelly. You get dry before I can get in, and I can’t keep it up long enough for you to get wet,’ he said, brutally, before fleeing with the two champagne flutes that she’d brought to drink from, not to mention the trousers of her red silk jim-jams. Then she met Robert. He was a member of AA and already had a girlfriend, whom he rang repeatedly, in order to tell her he loved her. He had also started drinking again. The following lovers were equally, if not more, unappetising (one of them sucked boiled sweets when they had sex) and finally she bumped into the much younger Graham, whom she adored because he pompously uttered this smug and well-worn cliché, which it appears she had never heard before in her life: ‘The greatest pleasure for me in making love is giving the other person pleasure.’

In her latest book, Juska tells us what happened next. And the answer is, apart from a lot of waffle about being a sad old woman, not a lot. Graham, naturally, dumped her for a young girl because he hoped to have children; she spent a lot of her time going on book-signing tours, and talking to women’s groups, but still, at the age of seventy-three, Jane hasn’t grown up. It’s not her desperation for a man that is so unattractive, nor her excessive admiration for Trollope (Jesus!), it’s her naivety, her total lack of wisdom or self-respect, which, while understandable in a girl of twenty-five or even a woman of thirty-five, is really unacceptable in a very mature woman.

And yet, if she’s to be believed, in the States she’s apparently fêted as some kind of guru. Everywhere she goes, older women are lining up to meet her with tears in their eyes, begging her for the secret of how to Find a Man. Juska’s reply is always the simple mantra: ‘Go online.’

Jane Juska spends most of this book parading her love of art. Books are more to her than food, music sublime, she’s always visiting an art gallery or discussing the meaning of life with friends. She’s one of those American women who can be found by the libraryload in East Coast towns – no doubt quite fun to meet in a kind of slobbery Alsatian puppy kind of way, but someone who would soon drive you nuts after she’d mentioned Walt Whitman, Proust or Eliot for the thousandth time.

In this book we hear that she falls for people like Dan, a man who taught me to love opera, black-and-white movies, and, on Sunday afternoons, champagne. Accompanied by the glories of La Traviata playing at top volume on his fine stereo, we toasted each other, celebrating our like-mindedness on books and music and people, very few of whom escaped our often malicious judgment.

She falls for people like Graham (‘Why is it’, asks this ‘wit’, ‘that on a Chinese menu you have to get to at least number fifteen before anything seems interesting?’) – a man who reads Proust aloud to her in the mornings.

In the only good scene in the book, where she has disastrous and meaningless sex with Malcolm, the foreplay consists of a conversation about Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, which they had seen in London:

‘I love Stoppard but not Jumpers,’ says Jane.

‘How can you not love a play about logical positivism?’ says Malcolm.

‘Logical positivism does not a play make. He should’ve written a book,’ says Jane. ‘Would you agree that Jumpers is not Stoppard’s best?’

It all makes you long to rush into a McDonald’s, read The Sun, and then have sex with a homeless crack addict lying on the pavement on the way home.

Predictably, Juska feels obliged to mention 11 September, when she was ‘awash with a feeling of hopelessness, uselessness, despair’. And naturally, shoehorned into it all, is an encounter with some Persian women with whom she shares her insights into blokes.

I like Jane Juska. She’s like a teenager. The problem is that I want, at the same time, to kill her. I suspect it’s because I’m single, sixty-two and very English, and I really feel she’s letting the side down.

 

        

Short Takes

By Barbara Fisher  |  June 25, 2006

Unaccompanied Women: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate
By Jane Juska
Villard, 272 pp.

Several years ago, Jane Juska boldly placed a personal ad that read, ``Before I turn 67, I would like to have sex with a man I like." She received a terrific response. She chronicled her adventures in a best-selling book, ``A Round-Heeled Woman." In ``Unaccompanied Women" she chronicles the adventures of being not only a somewhat famous author but also a ``septuagenarian sex symbol." I suspect the response to this book will not be so enthusiastic.

As a sexpert, she travels from her home in California to New York reading from her work. The members of her audience, like herself, are hoping to find a date. Juska usually finds other older women, happy to recount their own stories of elder sex or sorrowfully to recall loss and loneliness. Their stories are recounted here -- snippets about women we don't really know or care about. Juska, despite some new dates and a continuing romance with her former younger lover, remains alone. There is no one who wishes to share her life.

Having few new encounters to report, and a resigned rather than rambunctious spirit, Juska reports on her ignorance as a Midwestern sorority girl in the '50s. Girls didn't have sex then, and if they did, they certainly didn't talk about it. Now everyone talks about sex all the time, and yes, it seems, times are better.

 

 

THE TLS n.º 5390   July 21, 2006

Memoirs

Jane Juska

UNACCOMPANIED WOMEN

Late-life adventures in love, sex, and real estate

253pp. Chatto and Windus. £ l2.99

0 7011 7804 3

Five years ago Ms Juska — retired school-teacher, “septuagenarian sex symbol” and best-selling author — placed an advertisement in the New York Times: she wanted “a lot of sex with a man I like”. A Round-Heeled Woman (2003) told the story of what happened next. Unaccompanied Women describes what happened after that, and finds Juska “back at square one”, with no man to share her life with and no home to call her own. Thirty-three-year-old Graham, whose visit was imminent as her first book ended, is now happily married to someone else, and Juska spends much of this second book in mourning for him, which undercuts her initial stand-point, namely that she wanted to live “like a man” - with no responsibilities, no regrets and no ties. “Freedom, early or late, feels good”, she assures us. But she becomes “deeply attached” to every moo she sleeps with. Her life is filled with book signings, promotional readings and much interaction via email or the telephone with men whom she has already been to bed with or who want to seduce her. Yet she is “empty without Graham”, and the generally lacklustre tales she hears from individuals who hang about after her readings don’t gain any sparkle when she retells them here.

“When love hits, we turn sixteen”, she says, and this breezy assertion seems borne out in her writing which veers between the would-be wisdom of the spurned - quoting tags from poets and the shrill tones of the lovesick teenager: “Oh boy. she went all the way”, “Gee, I might even get laid”, “Is that cool? Am I seducible?”. She certainly is, but often from feelings of guilt, inadequacy, or boredom. One of the less pleasant stories here is of a night spent with au ancient, ugly Londoner, who wanted sex in return for a room in his club.

The unhappy truth is that sex has not made Jane Juska happy. She is “almost as bad off [sic] as I’d been at the beginning, before I placed my ad”. Her predominant tone is mildly embittered, She may have “upset all the apple-carts”, as she says, hut her message is essentially conventional. She wants to own a house, not rent one. She thinks “the quality of sex depends on the people having it”. She wants happiness, not fun; she needs a companion more than a mate.

SHEENA JOUGHIN

SUMMER 2006

 

Desperate Grandmas

Kay S. Hymowitz

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