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Loading... The surrender : an erotic memoirby Toni Bentley
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  name99 | Nov 15, 2006 |  TTAISI-Editor | Aug 24, 2006 | 
 Sex, it is always claimed, is immensely difficult to write about. But that's not quite true. To recount the embarrassments and alienation of lackluster coitus is a relative doddle. It is good sex -- or great sex -- that presents the real challenges for a writer. While Bentley certainly has the requisite pluck for the job, her prose, alas, proves incommensurate with her ambition.
Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0060732466, Hardcover)This NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK is a stunning story of sexual and spiritual awakening.Few women do it and even fewer will admit to it. But in Toni Bentley's daring and intimate memoir, THE SURRENDER, she pulls the sheets back on an erotic experience that's been forbidden since the Bible and celebrates "the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides." From STORY OF O to THE KISS TO THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERIN M, readers have been enthralled with sexually subversive memoirs by women. But even those erotic classics didn't navigate the psychosexual terrain that Bentley does when she meets a lover who introduces her to a radical and unexpected pleasure, to the "holy" act that she came to see as her awakening. THE SURRENDER is a witty, intelligent, and eloquent exploration of one woman's obsession that will be sure to leave readers questioning their own desires. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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What I find strange when I read an autobiography like this is how totally foreign the story feels, unlike say A Round-Heeled Woman.
The focus of her life just has so little overlap with the focus of my life, all this obsession with her father and religious fervor and weird sublimations.
I guess the good thing to come out of reading books like this is a kind of ""someone for everyone" attitude:
there are women, like her who appear to despise what I would consider fundamental decency in a man, just like there are men who seem obsessed with "bad" women, strippers and so on, and everything in between.
So rather than tying yourself up in knots trying to match whatever male image TV, movies, this month's best-selling book or whatever is peddling, rather channel that effort into finding someone who wants what you are. (