Surrender: An Erotic Memoir
Few women do it and even fewer will admit to it. But in Toni Bentley's daring and intimate memoir, The Surrender, she pulls the sheets back on an erotic experience that's been forbidden since the Bible and celebrates "the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides." From Story of O to The Kiss to The Sexual Life of Catherine M., readers have been enthralled with sexually subversive memoirs by women. But even those erotic classics didn't navigate the...
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Few women do it and even fewer will admit to it. But in Toni Bentley's daring and intimate memoir, The Surrender, she pulls the sheets back on an erotic experience that's been forbidden since the Bible and celebrates "the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides." From Story of O to The Kiss to The Sexual Life of Catherine M., readers have been enthralled with sexually subversive memoirs by women. But even those erotic classics didn't navigate the psychosexual terrain that Bentley does when she meets a lover who introduces her to a radical and unexpected pleasure, to the "holy" act that she came to see as her awakening.The Surrender is a witty, intelligent, and eloquent exploration of one woman's obsession that will be sure to leave readers questioning their own desires. The New York Times - Zoe Heller The Surrender is a brave book -- although not because it tackles a ''taboo'' or because it is frank. (Candor is surely too epidemic in the popular culture, these days, to qualify any longer as courageous.) Its bravery lies rather in its earnest attempt to do justice to the transcendent dimension of a profane act. Sex, it is always claimed, is immensely difficult to write about. But that's not quite true. To recount the embarrassments and alienation of lackluster coitus is a relative doddle. It is good sex -- or great sex -- that presents the real challenges for a writer.
\ Leon Wieseltier"A small masterpiece of erotic writing."\ \ \ \ \ Time Out New York"Revealing and witty."\ \ \ New York Times Book Review"Brave."\ \ \ \ \ The New York Observer"Plucky."\ \ \ \ \ Entertainment Weekly"Stylish and amusing."\ \ \ \ \ Entertainment Weekly“Stylish and amusing.”\ \ \ \ \ Time Out New York“Revealing and witty.”\ \ \ \ \ New York Times Book Review“Brave.”\ \ \ \ \ The New York Observer“Plucky.”\ \ \ \ \ Zoe HellerThe Surrender is a brave book -- although not because it tackles a ''taboo'' or because it is frank. (Candor is surely too epidemic in the popular culture, these days, to qualify any longer as courageous.) Its bravery lies rather in its earnest attempt to do justice to the transcendent dimension of a profane act. Sex, it is always claimed, is immensely difficult to write about. But that's not quite true. To recount the embarrassments and alienation of lackluster coitus is a relative doddle. It is good sex -- or great sex -- that presents the real challenges for a writer. \ — The New York Times\ \ \ \ \ Publishers Weekly"I am sitting on the threshold. Perhaps this is the final paradox of God's paradoxical machinations: my ass is my very own back door to heaven. The Pearly Gates are closer than you think." Bentley is writing of her rhapsodic experience with sodomy. So some will call this memoir blasphemous, others spiritual; some pornographic, others erotic. What it is, is wonderfully smart and sexy and witty and moving, a tale of unbounded passion that leads to transcendence. The tale is paradoxical in more ways than one: aside from Bentley's ass leading to heaven, she finds that submission leads to freedom a freedom she had never known as a dancer with the New York City Ballet (about which she wrote her first book, Winter Season), nor in her failed marriage, nor in any of her other polymorphously perverse sexual experiences. While deeply serious, Bentley is also hilarious as she describes the delights of crotchless panties ("they come in many different styles each with its own je ne sais quoi") and touching in an imagined obituary for her lover, A-Man ("He was the only one who took time to be friends with my cat.... He was the one with whom I couldn't tell whose pleasure gave me more pleasure"). Bentley's honesty about the most intimate of subjects is daring and delightful for those willing to follow her to, so to speak, the end. First serial to Playboy. Agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu. (Oct.) Forecast: Sodomy may, as Bentley writes, be the last taboo, and this book is very graphic, which might keep some readers away. But this could and should generate the buzz and sales that The Sexual Life of Catherine M. did two years ago. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.\ \
