Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
Writing honestly about sex takes moxie, but to reach the degree of subtlety and significance Angel attains also requires knowledge, literary finesse, wit, and acuity. This unique, aptly intimate book of meticulously crafted and succinct observations, aphorisms, musings, and intense vignettes illuminates the nature of desire and eroticism. Angel examines with startling insights the thoughts and feelings generated by sexual longing, satisfaction, and frustration; the language of sex; fantasy; pornography; the eroticism of archetypal gender roles; and the divide between a couple’s social demeanor versus private moments when they are “all teeth and claws and wings.” Angel looks back to her sexual awakening (“It is dangerous to be a girl. To be exciting to others”), consults Woolf and Sontag, and defines her “own feminist erotics.” Exquisitely attuned to the vicissitudes of the body-mind dynamic, Angel is funny, tender, candid, and generous. Wild, abandoned, fleshy pleasure is matched by intellectual and psychological complexity that embraces ire, fear, sorrow, and regret. This is a brave, beautiful, thoroughly considered, and haunting book of reflections, a masterful inquiry into sexuality and its consequences. --Donna Seaman