The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

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.

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.

In this delightfully unabashed memoir, Millet interweaves the erotic and the philosophical while recounting her sexual escapades. She reflects on the difference between intimacy and privacy, the interaction between physical space and mental space, the role of fantasy in sexuality, and the many permutations of love and desire that may arise between friends, lovers, and strangers. Neither glorifying nor criticizing the adventures of her youth, she offers detached, thoughtful discussion of her experiences, with the same care with which she might review a work of art. Touching on issues of trust, taboo, infidelity, jealousy, narcissism, marriage, anonymity, desire for affection, and sex as the expression of one's inner life, she recalls her first sexual experience, which involved several young men; orgies in which she has participated; spur-of-the-moment encounters with friends and strangers; and fantasies of becoming a high-class prostitute. Her intelligent, detailed examination of female sexuality fascinates and titillates. Readers of all persuasions about sex will derive something of value from Millet's honest, deeply personal exploration of her desires. Bonnie Johnston
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In this steamy work, a best seller throughout Europe, the editor of France's Art Press shatters gender assumptions by detailing her rollicking sex life.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.