Sensuality! Passion! Fun! As writers (here’s about the novel I’m writing) and readers, only good can come of finding what sets us afire. Figuring out how to unlock the shackles of cultural conditioning can be tricky, though. Learning about groundbreaking artists and their work can helps.
For instance, take how Emma Thompson has done it again — she’s the English actress who forever reaches further and further. By this, I’m not merely referring to the storyline of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.” In it, a 50ish recently widowed woman decides that, once and for all, she’s going to have good sex. She hires a twenty-something male prostitute.
What’s beyond incredible is the fact that we’ve never before seen this story on-screen — and why not? Why are post-menopausal woman who desire sex seen as aberrant, laughable, and even despicable?
Check out the film’s equally ground-breaking humanizing of a male sex worker who, moreover, isn’t repulsed by older women.
“Vladimir,” by Julia May Jonas, (which I recently finished in audiobook format and to which Rebecca Lowman lent a superb narration) offers a reckoning of sexuality. That of everyone, including love and relationships, both public and private. Aren’t the title and cover great, especially as it’s a literary novel, not the saucy romance genre implied?
The protagonist is a college prof in her 50s who has an open marriage with her college prof husband. We enter the story when he’s accused of overstepping his authority because he used to have trysts with students. Even though the rendezvous were with consenting women in their twenties and older, and they occurred before the college had instituted regulations against it, he’s about to lose his job. So there’s that.
And then there’s how the wife is judged because she neither sides against him nor divorces him. Not that anyone knows it, she’s had extra-marital relationships with men of all ages. Then there’s how their adult lesbian daughter judges the parents. There are also the students, the faculty… And in walks beefy Vladimir, who throws the protag into lust overdrive.
My review for Amazon and Goodreads (by the way, do you use Goodreads or anything like it?):
Julia May Jonas takes risk after risk with this novel and beckons us to — ooh lala — dare I say it? — think!
What do you think about how older women are portrayed?
Happiness Between Tails by da-AL 