A Round-Heeled Woman - Jane Juska

This is the memoir of Jane Juska's experiences after she placed a personal ad in The New York Review of Books that read as follows: "Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." Round-heeled is old slang for promiscuous - think about it, if your heels were round, you'd always be falling over backwards! It has been marketed very much as a sex memoir, which is a shame as it is the romantic and sexual elements of Juska's story which are the most disappointing. Juska's adventures with men are the least compelling elements of her story. It's beautifully written, ...  Read the complete review

“Before I turn 67 - next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” So ran Jane Juska’s personal ad. in her favourite journal, “ The New York Review of Books” and it is here that her tale begins. The term “ round-heeled woman” apparently means a woman of easy virtue. This together with the subtitle, “My Late–Life Adventures in Sex and Romance” suggests a titillating read, especially for ladies of a certain age, but does this live up to such a promising opening? A friend handed this book to me as a gift after she had felt unable to get to grips with it and I was more than happy to take ...  Read the complete review

I don’t know whether there are more books around about people’s sex lives, or if I’m just running into more of them than I used to. (I nearly put “coming across” in that last sentence, but that would have provided an unpleasant and totally inaccurate image, so I thought better of it). In the last twelve months I have read supposed biographies and one work of fiction about women working as prostitutes in both London and New York, a male prostitute in 1970s Los Angeles and a woman who hadn’t had sex for three years. Whilst these books were varied in quality, explicitness and enjoyability, they all had one thing in common. The people involved, whether real or ...  Read the complete review