- Narrator: Author-read out of necessity rather than preference, on a memoir whose whole method is thinking aloud and changing course.
- Subjects: Inherited feminism, desire against ideology, the gap between liberation and satisfaction
- Tone: Searching, candid, deliberately unresolved
- Bottom line: A memoir that refuses to conclude and earns the refusal, best for listeners who like their questions left open.
Memoirs about desire usually pick a lane, confession or analysis, and stay inside it. Nona Willis Aronowitz refuses to choose, which is what makes this audiobook harder and more interesting than its title suggests. At thirty-two her marriage was falling apart, her libido was not, and the era around her was one of fear, reckoning and reimagining. What she does with that collision is turn to the archive, her mother's very much included, and read her way toward something like an answer.
Daughter and Mother Auditing the Same Politics
The archive is the spine of the book. Aronowitz sets her own search alongside stories reaching back nearly two hundred years: ambivalent wives and free lovers, radical lesbians and sensitive men, women who risk everything for sex and women who refuse it outright. The most loaded source in that lineup is her late mother, Ellen Willis, an early radical pro-sex feminist whose positions she is simultaneously inheriting and arguing with. A daughter auditing her mother's politics makes an unusual engine for a book about wanting things.
Royko, posting four stars, read it as an argument about permission: when, under what circumstances and with whom it is acceptable for a woman to have sex, weighed feminist against societal. That is a fair account of the surface, and the same review notices something sharper underneath, that the search it describes leaves its author empty a good deal of the time, which may be exactly why the book carries the title it carries. That reading lands closer to the truth than the publisher's copy does.
An honest description would be a book that keeps failing to reach a conclusion and keeps being interesting about the failure. Bustle, Esquire, Nylon and The Millions all named it among their most anticipated, and the copy calls it a blend of memoir, social history and cultural criticism. What none of that conveys is the texture. Aronowitz builds a historical case for a position and then sits with the fact that the case has not settled anything for her personally.
Aronowitz Reads Her Own Revised Position
Aronowitz reads it herself, and for this particular book that choice is close to structurally necessary. A memoir that revises its own position in the first person needs the person doing the revising; handing these sentences to a hired reader would convert genuine ambivalence into performed ambivalence. Penguin Audio made the obvious call, and the fact that one name fills both the byline and the reader credit is the single most informative thing the listing tells you about the recording.
The five-star account heading the review list identifies its writer as a woman who came of age while the second wave feminist movement was happening, and credits Aronowitz with putting words to feelings and experiences it had carried for decades and suspected were widely shared. That effect is more interesting arriving from that generation than from the author's own, because a running argument of the book is that every cohort of women inherits a settlement it had no part in negotiating.
Register is the other reason to take this by ear. These are questions asked out loud, and the central one, what exactly do I want, and are those wants even possible amid patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy, sounds different spoken than it looks on paper. Rebecca Traister's blurb calls the book "accessible to anyone struggling with the persistent, maddening inequities of contemporary sex," and accessibility is largely a matter of tone, which is precisely what a voice carries and a page does not.
Boring, Unresolved, and Filed Under a Women Tag
The dissent on the listing deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off. A one-star account, headed "Don't waste your money," reports arriving on the strength of other reviews and finding boring observations, a boring life and, in its own capitalized phrasing, boring Reading. Whether that last charge aims at the prose or at the recording cannot be settled from the sentence. The account signs off by saying the author simply likes listening to herself write, which is the standing indictment of memoir and is not always wrong.
Structurally the book does not resolve, and a certain kind of reader will find that maddening. Aronowitz poses a question in the opening pages and is still turning it over at the close; the historical material keeps supplying precedents instead of verdicts. If you want a thesis you can carry out of a book and apply the same week, this is not built to hand you one. The title functions as a warning rather than as a tease.
Two things sit in the margins here. The listing shelves this under history with a Women tag, which captures one of the three things the book is and neither of the other two, so anyone browsing memoir or cultural criticism will walk straight past it. And the 4.0 average, drawn from 106 ratings, happens to match the mean of the five posted opinions exactly, which is coincidence rather than confirmation. A hundred silent ratings can conceal almost any distribution behind a tidy number.
One content caution is real: the historical stretches run dense. Nearly two centuries of sexual politics are compressed into a memoir's length, names arrive quickly, and context is assumed rather than supplied. Listeners without a grounding in feminist history will follow the argument and lose some of the citations, which costs more in audio than in print because glancing back a paragraph is not an option. The memoir chapters carry no such tax.
For Women in Their Thirties, Forties, and Fifties
A five-star account calls this the context that women in their thirties, forties and fifties needed in order to understand their own desires and to articulate their dissatisfaction, and that remains the sharpest audience definition anyone has offered for the book. Add to it anyone who grew up on a version of sexual liberation that turned out to be a fresh set of obligations rather than fewer old ones.
It also rewards readers of feminist history who want theory tested against a life rather than against other theory. The mother-daughter dimension does work that no secondary source could: Ellen Willis's arguments are examined here by someone who loves them and has had to live inside their consequences, which is a harsher and more useful form of scrutiny than admiration or rejection.
Readers who want a tidy argument will find this frustrating by design, and anyone hoping for a practical guide to better sex has the wrong book altogether, since Aronowitz is interested in why the question stays hard rather than in closing it. Listeners who bristle at cultural criticism naming patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy in one breath should also pass; the framing is printed on the outside of the box. Everyone else gets a searching, unresolved, unusually honest memoir read by the only person who could have read it.
