Jane Juska, who has died aged 84, was the author of A Round-Heeled Woman (2003), the sparky, bestselling memoir of her exploration as a pensioner of the pleasures (and pitfalls) of sex.
In 1999, Juska was a retired, divorced schoolteacher living in California who had not been on a date, let alone in a relationship, for 27 years. "I wanted to invite a man into my life but I just couldn't find one," she recalled. Inspired by the plot of Eric Rohmer's film, An Autumn Tale, she accordingly placed a personal ad in the New York Review of Books.
Its wording was deliberately explicit: "Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." The ad quickly received 63 eager replies. One included a photograph of a man wearing only sunglasses.
She decided to meet nine of the correspondents, most of whom lived on the East Coast, and with five of whom she went to bed. She later confided that she had expected "to be murdered or made sad at the very least". But the worst that happened to her was when "Jonah the Thief" stole her champagne glasses and silk pyjamas. Jonah was over 80.
More positively, her adventure became one of self-discovery. She was cheered to meet "men who are kind and thoughtful and funny and true". It was one of them who advised her to write up what she was doing as autobiography.
Its title came from an old term for a woman who can easily be laid on her back. She maintained that "Moby Dick is not just about some madman's search for the whale", but her writing was at times unabashedly descriptive, for she found that with fewer hang-ups she was much keener on sex than before.YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:..