Desire Makes the Difference

Eighty-three-year-old Carrietté has kept “a copy of every word [she’s] ever put on paper” and proves it in this memoir about her late-life sexual awakening, in which she collages journal entries, letters, and narrative interludes. She opens with a description of her childhood and a mother who forbade her from wearing sweaters lest she accentuate her bosom. The memoir then examines the author’s first marriage, to a man who was “careful to never touch her” during sex; abuse by her psychiatrist; and a second marriage that ended in disaster. Finally she began a long-lived open relationship with a man whose fear of commitment kept him from kissing her on the lips. Debut author Carrietté’s work is marked by fluid prose tending toward the purple, especially when detailing her many erotic encounters. The memoir’s structure reveals a woman often at odds with herself, contradictions made evident by letters professing deep attachment that are followed by sudden separations, breakups leading to unsatisfying reunions, and assertions that she had “no desire to disrupt” the life of a married childhood love punctuated by detailed fantasies about him. Best suited for readers who appreciate graphic depictions of sexual acts, this memoir will appeal to anyone who’s been shunned for harboring, and acting on, convention-defying desires. (BookLife)