The Sexual Life of Catherine M. - Hardcover

Millet, Catherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802117163 ISBN 13: 9780802117168

Publisher: Grove Pr, 2002

Synopsis

In an erotic memoir, the editor of Art Press describes her remarkably active and free sexual life as she honestly and graphically describes her world of physical gratification, the consequences of sex stripped of sentiment, and the fallacies of female sexuality.

About this title

About the Author:

Catherine Millet, who lives in Paris, is an expert on modern art and is the editor of the magazine, Art Press. Her last book, L'Art Contemporain, was published in 1997. She curated the French section of the 1989 Sao Paulo Biennale and the French Pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale.

From Publishers Weekly:

Millet, art critic and editor of Art Press, has become a literary sensation in France with the publication of this graphic memoir of some 30 years of her sexual adventures. Millet's "gift for observation" and her "solid superego" are as useful in her career as an art critic as they are in her erotic explorations: her ability to concentrate and observe puts her inside "other people's skins." Comparisons have been made to The Story Of O, but Millet is more in the tradition of Jean Genet and Violette Leduc, whose descriptions of their sexual encounters were not meant to titillate so much as to explore the meaning of the erotic. Millet's "quest for the sexual grail" takes her to group orgies, gang bangs in French parks and other serial sex escapades. Before long, the sex begins to seem utterly routine, in spite of the elaborate staging. Millet and her readers are then free to consider more closely some questions she raises: how oral sex compares to vaginal intercourse; why sex in disgusting circumstances is not about "self-abasement," but raising oneself "above all prejudice"; or why solitary sex is more pleasurable for her than sex with a partner. Toward the end of this curiously graceful memoir, Millet comes close to explaining her need for all this sex: only by sloughing off the "mechanical body" she'd been born with could she experience actual sexual pleasure. While women readers will find much of interest, male readers may have to overcome a certain emperor's new clothes-type discomfort, as they realize that Millet may know more about the male body than they do.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0802117163
• ISBN 13: 9780802117168
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 209