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I’ve been reading a wonderful book lately.  It’s a memoir called A ROUND-HEELED WOMAN:  MY LATE-LIFE ADVENTURES IN SEX AND ROMANCE.  For those of you who aren’t Renaissance scholars, “round-heeled” means loose and sexually adventuresome.  I want to make it clear right away that I’m not the sort who like to read stories of sexual adventures in the normal way of things.  Leather, dingy New York environments, shadowy Parisian parking lots...I know those kind of memoirs are out there and they don’t interest me much.  This book is different.

The author, Jane Juska, was a schoolteacher for years.  She married early, divorced and then raised her son alone.  She subscribed to Mark Twain’s theory:  “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it passes.” And so, as she says, she “grew fat.” When she was fifty, she weighed 234 pounds.  She was a fabulous teacher in a California high school.  “Teaching,” she writes, “saved me from becoming a full-time drunk but not from becoming an obese, middle-aged, unhappy, distraught, frantic woman.” oh dear.

Anyway, to speed forward a little bit, she has some therapy to learn to manage various aspects of a difficult childhood and worse marriage, she starts going to the gym, she quits smoking, and most crucially—she learns from her therapist that pleasure is not bad, that it’s natural for people to desire pleasure. 

So she decides to write a personals ad.  Since she is manifestly an intellectual, she puts her ad in the New York Review of Books.  It says:

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.

I am NOT telling what happened...let me just say that the journey kept me reading late at night several days in a row.

But now that I’m finished with the book, I started thinking about singles ads.  The heroine of my next book, PLEASURE FOR PLEASURE, Josie, would have relished the whole idea of the singles ad.  After all, she’s desperate.  The book opens with her sister Imogen’s wedding - -which means that she’s the only Essex sister left unmarried.  And she’s pretty sure getting a proposal might be difficult, since she’s plump and (to her mind) not as beautiful as her sisters.  Plus she’s been labeled “The Scottish Sausage” and no men will even dance with her.

What do you think?  Imagine Regency England, with gauzy, half-transparent dresses, an extraordinary amount of dukes hanging around the place—and the London Times running singles ads.  What do you think Josie’s singles ad should look like?  Remember:  she’s clever, very funny and wry.  And she desperately wants a husband.