Sugar in My Bowl

May 23, 2011
In this no-holds-barred collection of essays by "real women" about "real sex," Jong has assembled an eclectic group of authors: Fay Weldon's "My Best Friend's Boyfriend," about losing her virginity to her best friend's boyfriend at college not long after the end of WWII is witty and poignant; Eve Ensler pens a charming, rhythmic triologue in which three women muse longingly, and poetically, on their sexual pasts and fantasies ("Sometimes it's driving on the mad / Italian speedway at a thousand miles / Your face buried in his jeans"); Marisa Acocella Marchetto sketches a "Graphic Fantasy" about the adventures of a woman with a penis; gossip columnist Liz Smith divulges that her first cousin was the first man with whom she "went all the way"; Honor Moore writes a sexy, fragmented essay, spliced with quotes from the "taboo" Story of O: "...O tried to figure out why there was so much sweetness mingled with the terror in her, or why her terror seemed itself so sweet..." Early in the book, Susan Cheever muses that "sex tells the truth"; this collection is at its most profound when truth illuminates sex as a force in which these women found empowerment.

June 15, 2011

Best-selling author and poet Jong (Fear of Flying) compiles a powerful group of essays, stories, and monologs by women on their own sexual experiences. She chose the name of the anthology from traditional blues songs by women who focused on soulfully expressing the feminine sexual experience. The authors write in a variety of styles but are united by a common goal to express their truth and paint vivid pictures of the female experience with stark honesty, leaving out fairy tales and romance. As expected, explicit sexual language is present throughout, as women tackle their obsessions and kinks, lost innocence and enlightenment, and pain and yearnings. "The truth is," Jong shares in her introduction, "sex is life...the part that continues it and makes it bloom." VERDICT While this is not a comfortable collection, the passion, tragedy, and hope--offered by courageous women who express raw feelings that society tends to silence--will resonate.--Crystal Renfro, Georgia Inst. of Technology Lib., Atlanta

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2011

Award-winning writer and high-flying sexual truth-teller Jong (Love Comes First, 2009, etc.) partners with 28 collaborators to create this fierce and refreshingly frank collection of personal essays, short fiction and cartoons celebrating female desire.

The approaches to the still-taboo topic of feminine sexuality—at least, for women writers seeking approbation from the literary establishment—are, as Jong notes, "as varied as sexuality itself" and as exuberantly diverse as the contributors themselves. They range from such emerging talents as Elisa Albert and J.A.K. Andres to such luminaries as Rebecca Walker, Eve Ensler, Susan Cheever, Anne Roiphe and Fay Weldon, and represent a multiethnic, multigenerational swath of some of the finest women writers in the United States. Most of the pieces deal with the perennial themes of sexual coming-of-age, social and religious sexual hang-ups and lusty obsessions for male bodies (as well as female ones). Some deal with lesser-discussed—but no less important—subjects like procreative sex and eroticism in old age. Still others fearlessly explore fetishism, childhood masturbation, kink, sexual addiction and the excitement that, in the words of Linda Gray Sexton, comes from "the offering up of one's body like a sacrifice upon the temple of the bed." While sex is the source of life and some of the most powerful joys—and agonies—imaginable, it is also invariably linked to death. And that, writes Jong, "is part of our discomfort with it." But the contributors to this collection never make sex facile. As they work against cultural expectations and literary double standards, they make women's depictions of "doing it" just another aspect of a more fully realized human consciousness.

A smart, scrumptiously sexy romp of a read.

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