The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
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2.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This New York Times–bestselling memoir of one woman’s erotic escapades is “brilliantly literate, utterly unabashed [and] consistently provocative” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
Since it was first published in France, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. has become a global literary phenomenon, hailed as one of the most important books on sexuality to be published in decades.
Catherine Millet, the eminent editor of Art Press, has always led a free and active sexual life—from alfresco encounters in Italy to a gang bang on the edge of the Bois du Boulogne to a high-class orgy at a chichi Parisian restaurant. She has taken pleasure in the indistinct darkness of a peep show booth and under the probing light of a movie camera at an orgy. And in The Sexual Life of Catherine M., she recounts it all, from tender interludes with a lover to situations where her partners were so numerous and simultaneous they became indistinguishable parts of a collective body.
A graphic account of physical gratification and a relentlessly honest look at the consequences—both good and bad—of sex stripped of sentiment, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is “truly a masterpiece of sexual exploration [that] will be a classic” (The Hartford Courant).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Millet, art critic and editor of Art Press, has become a literary sensation in France with the publication of this graphic memoir of some 30 years of her sexual adventures. Millet's "gift for observation" and her "solid superego" are as useful in her career as an art critic as they are in her erotic explorations: her ability to concentrate and observe puts her inside "other people's skins." Comparisons have been made to The Story Of O, but Millet is more in the tradition of Jean Genet and Violette Leduc, whose descriptions of their sexual encounters were not meant to titillate so much as to explore the meaning of the erotic. Millet's "quest for the sexual grail" takes her to group orgies, gang bangs in French parks and other serial sex escapades. Before long, the sex begins to seem utterly routine, in spite of the elaborate staging. Millet and her readers are then free to consider more closely some questions she raises: how oral sex compares to vaginal intercourse; why sex in disgusting circumstances is not about "self-abasement," but raising oneself "above all prejudice"; or why solitary sex is more pleasurable for her than sex with a partner. Toward the end of this curiously graceful memoir, Millet comes close to explaining her need for all this sex: only by sloughing off the "mechanical body" she'd been born with could she experience actual sexual pleasure. While women readers will find much of interest, male readers may have to overcome a certain emperor's new clothes type discomfort, as they realize that Millet may know more about the male body than they do.
