The Year I Learned to Text: Why Am I Having Sex With a Muslim in My Basement?

Julie is a celibate, post-menopausal conservative in the process of reinventing herself in Hollywood as an actress and comedienne. In search of the perfect mate, she signs up for an online dating service and meets a man twenty-two years her junior—a Muslim named Ali. Despite her misgivings, she and this boy with beautiful, black eyes begin a torrid affair, engaging in erotic meetings in her basement.

Between auditions, working on television, and performing her stand-up routine, Julie rediscovers sexual expression on her nightly magic carpet ride with Ali. But things seem off about him—his anti-American pillow talk, his contradictions of his Islamic religion, his hypochondria, and he exact whereabouts of his apartment. When he invites her to join him to live in a cave in Afghanistan, Julie suspects things may have gone too far.

Her dysfunctional family members love giving her advice, but Julie does her own research and learns all things Middle Eastern. In an effort to loosen from his grasp, Julie buys a second home to renovate—a foreclosed vintage cabin in the mountains to which she runs in her feeble attempts to find herself in between mini-breakups from the Muslim sociopath, who continually bounces back into her Hollywood bungalow basement.

In this romantic comedy wrought with honesty, Julie grapples with the addictive nature of great sex and the pitfalls of dating someone who might not be the perfect fit after all.

Born in California in 1948, Juliet Montague is a confused, irrational, and insecure woman of her time. A retired court stenographer, now actor/realtor/comedian living alone in her Hollywood bungalow with two left-over dogs and one mangy cat, she waits in vain for her last great romance. This is her first novel in The Muslim Romance Trilogy.