The Sexual Life of Catherine M

Finishing up Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M. It's an excellent book and I've enjoyed it thoroughly. Not for the conservative. This book is explicit wall-to-wall sex. What I'm finding interesting in the later chapters of the book is that it's no longer arousing, or at least not as much as it was when I started the book. 

It's not that the passages are less steamy later on. I will admit that at a certain point, a couple hundred pages of every type of sexual activity imaginable can be a bit repetitive, but what I think is the larger issue at work, and the great strength of the book is understanding what motivates human beings on a primal level. That is what most of the book truly centers on and I didn't fully appreciate that in the early chapters, as I was enraptured in the shear erotic boldness of the book. As the novelty of the sexual descriptions wore off, I became more and more engaged in who she and her countless partners were as human beings. What drew them to their particular sexual behaviors and how the primal human exists and expresses itself in all of us.

Beneath all of the sex, there is a tremendous level of powerful exploration of humanity and psychology. I wish I could have the courage to be as honest, on the written page and in every day life, as the author is in this work. Ambitious and terrifying.