Swooning Beauty
A Memoir of Pleasure
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
When her parents died and her marriage disintegrated within the span of a few months, art historian and performance artist Joanna Frueh entered a painful period of grief and mourning. This book is about how she healed herself and in the process explored the range of her potential as a woman.Swooning Beauty is an intimate memoir of discovery and healing. Frueh’s path to recovery lay through a profound examination of her intuitions, desires, fantasies, dreams, and emotions, her capacity for pleasure—visual, sensual, intellectual, gastronomic, and erotic—and her sense of her own heroic female identity. Hers is the passionate voice of a creative, intelligent woman scrutinizing the nature of love in all its forms and the ways of being that make us free, flexible, more fully real and more fully human. The result is an engaging view into the rich and colorful inner life of a woman at the threshold of middle age, of the blossoming of mind and spirit that comes after suffering and self-realization. Pleasure, she concludes, “is the absence of lack. Self-love is a necessary plenitude. Vigilance in love brings us freedom. Freedom is not an absolute whose attainment is humanly impossible. Yogis say that the self that is not ego is free. That self is the spacious heart, the spacious mind.” Frueh offers us wisdom and comfort for the journey into middle age, and the deep pleasure of encountering a generous, lively spirit and a remarkably spacious mind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A performance artist and art history professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, Frueh has a lot to say about her own sexuality. She shares with readers her girlhood masturbation pleasures, her memory of seeing her parents having sex and her parents' celebration of her first period. She describes her various experiences of arousal and orgasm, as well as her intense identification with Mel Gibson in Braveheart. She discusses favorite outfits, perfumes and makeup. Now and then she mentions her love of chocolate and sensuous flowers, and her theories about why people admire her "luminous sexuality" and find her so "seductive" and "glamorous." Yet it may be hard for some readers to find Frueh as fascinating as she finds herself. For Frueh's wing of the avant-garde, it's liberating to be into beauty, especially "high femininity" styling. Thus she dismisses Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues as insufficiently outrageous or revolutionary, only to go on for pages about the wonderfulness of the color pink, or how hot she thinks she looks in her Betsey Johnson dress with her cute little ankle boots. Frueh's book will be too narcissistic for most readers, though those who enjoy deep discussions of vaginas and vulvas will certainly be pleased.