These days, Dorothy Freed is in her seventies, and writes about sexuality long after menopause (she has a story in the Ageless Erotica collection reviewed above).
But in her 2017 book, Perfect Strangers, Dorothy reaches back and tells the tale of her sexual awakening in San Francisco during the days of hippies and free love. A child of the 1950s, Dorothy internalized all the expectations of the era of saddle shoes and happy homemakers.
Those illusions came crashing down when Dorothy caught her husband in bed with her best friend. She packed up her sons and drove from upstate New York to California, where she made a new home and never looked back. Like several others protagonists in my favorite novels and memoirs, this narrator balances a vivid, developing sexual life with family responsibilities (in this case, raising her two sons as a single mother). And for all her many sexual partners, the city of San Francisco is her one true love.
