Want Me

February 1, 2021
A sex journalist explores the manifestations of her own desires. In her savvy, deliciously racy debut memoir, Jezebel senior staff writer Clark-Flory begins with her childhood home, Berkeley, California, which "embraced the giddy spectacle of people doing their own thing." For the author, that included "watching porn as a teenager in the late nineties with a spotty dial-up connection." Later, "when I started actually having sex, porn became my aspirational guide to seductive moans, gymnastic positions, and superior blow jobs." The author engrossingly traces her journey toward sexual enlightenment through a succession of lustful and often adversarial encounters with men and women, all described in voyeuristic detail. Her partners included a sculpted, seductive airline pilot, a charming collegiate bad boy named after his parents' coke dealer ("Snow"), and a man she picked up in a bar to initiate a marathon one-night stand of rough "sexual punishment" designed to blissfully numb the crushing pain of her mother's terminal cancer diagnosis. Throughout her post-collegiate years, however, Clark-Flory struggled with the "drive to meet expectation and protect men's egos." In addition to her personal story, the author digs in to how pornography, feminism, gender roles, and "cultural wisdom around love and sex" lock horns socially and philosophically, a theme she spent years exploring in blog posts and reporting assignments. "My survey of the penile landscape wasn't intentional," she writes, "but it seems in retrospect like a ham-fisted climb toward a more nuanced understanding of dick-havers." She is always candid and often wry, whether discussing a male revue, an orgasmic meditation retreat, or the realities of true love and childbirth. The book features perspectives on female sexual behavior from developmental psychologists and sex researchers, adding intellectual depth to an often humorous chronicle as well as bonus layers of emotion and heart buried beneath the social observation and erotic fantasy. These elements make Clark-Flory's story an encouraging endorsement for women's sexual liberation. A provocative, resonant memoir of emboldened self-discovery.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2021
Clark-Flory isn't the 23-year-old single woman that she was when she began her career as a sex journalist. It's been a decade-long journey of discovery, about both how sex functions in Western culture and how she grew into adulthood as a product of it all. Raised by Midwestern parents in the Bay Area, Clark-Flory's first understanding of sex comes from her parents: their relationship to each other and to pornography. She enters young adulthood confused about the differences between what pornography displays as heterosexual desire and what heterosexual desire looks like in non-porn practice. Clark-Flory writes of this dissonance fearlessly. She throws herself completely into the world of porn sets, sex shops, strip clubs, and BDSM dungeons in search of deeper truths about society's oldest obsession. Amid her theoretical research, Clark-Flory comes of age before readers' eyes. Subtly chronological, this memoir-in-essays follows Clark-Flory through destructive hookups, faked orgasms, job insecurity, the loss of her mother, marriage, childbirth, and parenting. It is a wonder to witness an essay about Magic Mike Live (the Vegas strip show response to the 2012 film) become an existential exploration of mortality. The book is so brilliantly niche that it becomes completely universal.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.