Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Send?: A Meditation On The Loneliness Of The Sexes - Hardcover

Leader, Darian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465091695 ISBN 13: 9780465091690

Publisher: Basic Books, 1997

Synopsis

Why do men tend to keep love letters in files along with their other correspondence, whereas women often keep them with their clothes? And if a letter is written but not sent, at whom is it really directed? As Darian Leader shows, such questions go to the heart of sexual desire, which is never addressed to our flesh and blood companion, but always to something beyond him or her.
Why Do Women Write More Letters than They Send? is a provocative inquiry into the fundamental loneliness of each sex. Although a woman is essential to a man's sexual life, why is the reverse far from the case? Why should relationships frequently run aground on the trivial question, "What are you thinking?" If a man chooses as his partner a woman unlike his mother, why does he try to make her behave toward him exactly as his mother did when he was a boy? Why might a woman decide not to spend the night with a man after seeing his apartment, whereas for a man this would be unthinkable? And have you ever loved someone who did not make you feel guilty?
A unique contribution to the study of the sexes, Why Do Women Write More Letters than They Send? moves from high to low culture as it teases out the intriguing, at times startling, insights of contemporary psychoanalysis.

About this title

About the Author

Darian Leader is Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Reviews

An abstruse ``collage of observations and explanations'' about sexuality, whose British psychoanalyst author--inspired by the obscurantist Jacques Lacan--plays by his own rhetorical rules. Not for Leader (Lacan for Beginners, not reviewed) the conventions of serious argument: From the outset he promises lots of generalizations, commitment to questions rather than the systematic development of hypotheses, and an avoidance of authoritative footnotes or quotations. Thus licensed to zigzag with more imagination than discipline around some fertile psychosexual terrain, he seeks to excavate the deepest differences between men and women; mostly, however, he obfuscates tirelessly. Concerning jealousy, for example, he says that ``what a man is really jealous of is not another man but the sexuality of the opposite sex.'' Or on love, which for a man is ``ultimately addressed to a lack'' and for a woman is ``linked to the order of causality: The partner's lack must be guaranteed by her.'' Illustrations from the plot of an 18th-century Italian novel hardly make the preceding more accessible, although generally Leader finds support for his positions in skewed interpretations of more familiar literary and cultural references: the Audrey Hepburn role in Love in the Afternoon, the comedies of Shakespeare, even the marriage of Claudia Schiffer to magician and escape artist David Copperfield. As a woman, Leader writes, Schiffer must welcome the fact that part of the carnal appeal of her husband is ``the empty space left by his departure.'' Less surprising is Leader's linkage of a pregnant woman's food cravings with cannibalistic fantasies toward her child; ditto his explanation of why Virginia Woolf ``could never have a Room of her Own: Her father was always in there with her.'' He thrives on paradoxes: ``What . . . is the function of memory if not to allow us to forget?'' Madness over method, and defeatingly arcane. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this bizarre book, British psychoanalyst Leader ruminates on the nature of relationships. In stream-of-consciousness style, he writes about a variety of subjects, with references to a variety of cultural icons and signifiers, from Hitchcock to Lacan to romance novels, some of which will make more sense to readers than others. But Leader's writing style is almost impossible to follow, and the book is unfocused and dismally unorganized. Instead of casting more light on the ambiguities of love, Leader plunges the reader into a morass of confusion. He does not, for example, ever answer the question posed in the title. Not recommended.?January Adams, Franklin Twp. P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465091695
• ISBN 13: 9780465091690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176