How Boys See Girls

A very quick read, and a most enjoyable one - if you don't mind a lot of very frank talk of sex and how men - in their most secret thoughts - see women. This is probably the most compellingly "nasty" book I've read since Portnoy's Complaint. And yet Gilmour's books seems somehow sweeter than Roth's now classic book. The title here comes from a book that the protagonist's preadolescent daughter Zoey is reading. Near the end of the book I found another line that might have made an interesting title: "Holly Briggs, I love you." It was what the 40 year-old narrator, Bix, wrote, in very small letters, along the baseboard of his 20 year-old mistress's bedroom. But that title would make it sound too much like a book for young teenage girls, show more which is something How Boys See Girls certainly is not. It is instead a startlingly candid and graphic account of a May-December romance, an affair that is often reduced to near sordidness, but the skill of the writer prevents it from being mere pornography. Instead, maybe it's better to call it simply a "late coming-of-age" story. Suffice it to say that sexual obsession has perhaps never been quite so graphically described. It is brutally frank, funny, heartbreaking, tender and sad - all those things and more. Call me crude if you want, but this is a good book. show less

Okay, that's just ironic--my new favorite author David Gilmour, who has such flattering things to say about women
wrote a book about how boys see girls.

Oh, I think we know.

His "blame-the-interviewer" and "blame me talking French to someone else at the same time" apology doesn't help his case.