$13.80
ISBN 0802117163
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Susannah Indigo
(09/04/02)
"It's an ostentatiously obscene work of erotobabble."
--The New Yorker
"I had to put this book down after the first chapter because
I felt like my hands were covered in semen."
--an Amazon reader
The New Yorker is being a bit of a priss, but the Amazon reader has it exactly right -- you do indeed feel like you've waded into other peoples' bodily fluids after reading The Sexual Life of Catherine M. There's nothing coy about Catherine Millet's style of writing, and nothing girlish. Her writing is vaguely reminiscent of Henry Miller's enthusiasm for the hard edge of sexuality, both in language and quantity of sexual detail, except that he provided more passion per page than Millet has apparently ever experienced, in spite of her thousands of escapades and uncounted number of men.
In the biggest orgies in which I participated, from that time on, there could be up to about 150 people (they did not all fuck, some had come to watch), and I would take on the cocks of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways: in my hands, my mouth, my cunt and my ass. Sometimes I would exchange kisses and caresses with women, but that was always less important...Today I can account for forty-nine men whose sexual organs have penetrated mine and to whom I can attribute a name or, at least in a few cases, an identity. But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity.
Millet offers no excuses for her behavior, and says that she rarely gave it much thought during her thirty years of redefining the term "sport-fucking." She is fifty-four years old now, eight years monogamous with the same man she practiced open-marriage with during her adventurous years. And what an adventure it was: she did it in the gardens, she loved it on tabletops and car hoods, she was fond of Metro stations and museums, and the more men involved the merrier. She liked it up the ass as well as the pussy...but she never did it with a dog, even though a friend often teased her with the canine promise, and we are to assume she would have gone for it had the opportunity arisen. Her wild sex life was not a secret from anyone who knew her, and she rather enjoyed her reputation, being especially proud even today that she was known as "the girl who gave the best blowjob."
She never drank (who had time?); she never traveled and picked up strangers; she says she had a great ass and mediocre breasts; she considered prostitution but thought it too much effort to fuss over payment; she grew up Catholic but stopped believing in God when she started having sex; and she was an equal-opportunity fucker, never caring about beer guts or body odors. She has fabulous teeth today because she traded sex with a kinky dentist who kept girlfriends off in extra private examining rooms and fucked them in between working on patients (quickly!) But mostly she just spent all her spare time going to her version of French sex-parties and played out her fantasies. What's not to like about this woman?
The book is fun to read, in a purely voyeuristic way (assuming you're a bodily fluid kind of reader). It's not great erotica, being a bit too harsh and practical to fulfill most peoples' need for tension and desire and great passion. But it's an utterly harmless tale of one woman's life -- she doesn't have children; nobody gets hurt; she has a productive and respectable career. Yet the only reason I picked this book up was because of the controversy swirling around it -- wondering what, in a world in which the Story of O has never been out of print and is the eternal number one bestselling erotica book, could possibly make one woman's sexual memoir wild and "obscene."
Millet wrote the book because friends encouraged her to do so, and she wrote it factually because that's how she writes (she is the editor of "Art Press" and the author of eight books of art criticism). Her husband, Jacques Henric, an avant-garde poet and novelist, has also written a memoir of their times together, Legendes de Catherine M., (complete with her ass on the cover, bless the French) which only sold 40,000 copies to her millions (he says he didn't mind, because as a novelist he was used to selling only 4,000), but there was little worldwide publicity for this and certainly no controversy.
Millet reminds you of Kim Catrall's character on Sex and the City in her relentless pursuit of a good fuck...for about five minutes...and then Catherine M. leaves Samantha in her (sexual) dust. Millet's tale rings of authenticity and ordinary life in many ways -- there's no lingerie, no major neurosis, no dislike of men, but there are migraines, a bit of jealousy, and a full celebration of living inside of her own sexual desires, no apologies intended. Is this what makes it controversial? Do women have to write neurotic, or heaven help us, "perky," in order to be accepted by the general public? (think Bridget Jones and Manhattan Call Girl) Or do they have to be softer, perhaps more interested in love than lust in the long run, and then they can be graphic? (think Erica Jong) If a man wrote this book, I suspect it wouldn't even cause a stir, unless it was lauded as the next coming of Henry Miller. But a respected woman making an honest attempt to write something literary, intellectual, yet down and dirty pornographic is dismissed by most critics, particularly in the U.S. (while the book still sells like wildfire).
In the end I am left wondering two things about Millet -- first, why did she stop eight years ago? (no interview seems to reveal this) And then...when will I be able to buy her husband's book in the States, which includes photographs of her?! Her writing may not be my favorite writing on sex, but the woman herself rather fascinates me. She writes of the photography session in the closing of her book, while discussing her appreciation of art, images, bodies, and last but not least, the next (last?) target, the camera man:
My thighs and legs are spread wide, inscribing an almost perfect square. That is what I see today, but at the time I knew that it was what the man behind the camera was seeing. When, without putting the camera down, he came to remove my hand, my passage in which he slid was tumescent as never before. The reason was immediately clear: I was already filled by the coincidence of my real body and these multiple, volatile images.
