You remember Erica Jong: She who broke new ground with Fear of Flying, a 1973 novel that startled men and women at the time with its directness about female sexuality. Jong revisited sexuality in her 2015 novel Fear of Dying, which explores the sexual desire of a woman in her sixties. But before that novel, Jong edited this anthology of stories and essays by women of many ages about their sexual lives.
One of the loveliest things about this collection is the seamlessness of sexual experience across the stages of life; there is no pretense of reserving sexuality for the young. Read this book for the diverse ways women explore and describe and grow from erotic experience, throughout the lifespan. Every kind of experience, from purely physical release to sex as communion with spirit, is celebrated here.
The writer biographies at the back of the book hint at the kind of community we can build among ripe women awake to our eroticism.
