Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year without Sex

· Sold by Penguin
Ebook
288
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

Seeking love in an age obsessed with sex, a journalist chronicles her year without

On the eve of her thirtieth birthday, Hephzibah Anderson glimpsed her college boyfriend going into a jewelry store with a smiling blonde-and in that moment realized it had been years since a man told her he loved her. This discovery led her to question a decade of emotionally frustrating relationships with commitment phobes. As she examined her past, she recognized that most of these relationships went off course at the precise moment sex was involved. Anderson decided it was time to spend a full year without sex to rediscover its meaning and purpose in her life. In this confessional account, Anderson shares the results of that year, narrating each month as she flirts, dates, and swoons but doesn't have sex. The results-her feelings about femininity, her body, and romance-are illuminating.

Told with Elizabeth Gilbertesque candor, Chastened reveals much about our contradictory cultural attitudes towards sex and the ways intercourse has been used as a shortcut to deeper intimacies. An antidote to the growing genre of another-notch-in-the-bedpost memoirs, Chastened is a refreshing look at what's to be gained by going without.

About the author

Hephzibah Anderson graduated from Cambridge University with an English degree and has worked as a journalist and broadcaster ever since, contributing to publications including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Observer. She was the fiction editor at the Daily Mail and has written columns for The Observer (London) and the London Evening Standard. Her recent work has appeared in Bloomberg Muse and BBC Radio.

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