Abby Lee

"Girl with a one track mind" by Abby Lee is not the book I thought it was, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad book. Its quality depends entirely on what you are attracted to as a reader. I just feel a little bit confused as to why I thought it was a memoir about an anonymous sex blogger and what happened when their identity was discovered by the traditional press, when the book is actually more of a mash up between Belle Du Jour and Bridget Jones's diary.

The author starts off at the beginning of the book stating that being young, free, single and having casual sex whenever and apparently with whomever she wants is the ideal lifestyle. She emphatically states that she is very happy with it thank-you-very-much. Unfortunately by the end of the book, the author seems to be an neurotic mess who has been chasing a man that expresses no interest in her for a long term relationship. This changes the author's stance to one that laments that no matter how good the actual sex is, if casual, the sex is just empty and not enough to base an entire philosophy on. This somehow feels like a cheat. I thought she would start off as a confident woman who does what she wants responsibly, and with full emotional disclosure, a new type of modern woman who was happy, confident, and sexually mature. Instead, the author started off confident and sure of herself and then due to a series of crappy relationship choices becoming more needy and neurotic. To put it mildly the book felt a little unbalanced, and on the point of the author's own sexual ethics, mildly confused.

Abby Lee, feels like she spends majority of the text trying to justify why she wanted to have casual sex with people whilst aggressively demanding the reader not judge her negatively because of it, then promptly defending herself against the imagined (outraged / condemning) responses.

I as the reader, have no problem with the fact that she wanted casual sex as long as she understood what she was getting involved in (or not as the case may be) , instead of playing elaborate emotional games with herself.

And then there is the sex. And she does have sex. Plenty of sex. Leisurely sex, BDSM sex, voyeuristic sex, sex via personal ads. There are also no end of locations: sex in quite a few toilets as well as dubious semi-public sex in nightclubs, bars, taxies, and bus stops. There is sex with old friends, sex with strangers, and sex with friends of friends. Unfortunately this gets repetitive quite quickly and after the first few encounters most of the sex that she has seems quite boring.

I like Lee's writing style, and she always presents as a literate, intelligent and fiercely feminist, woman - something I look for in modern writers. I followed her on twitter and have read her blog for a few years. I have even been fortunate enough to have met her a couple of her speaking events and this is why I cannot understand why this book felt so unfulfilling.

This book was published in 2006, and I'm not sure if it was mostly the Daily Mail readers who were scandalised by the fact that an adult woman wants to have sex and plenty of it because she has a high sex drive.

This is not a surprising aspect of modern life to me or to any of my circle of friends. Perhaps I just have a sexually liberated and mature circle of friends?

As a sex memoir covering the diarised year of a modern woman living in a major UK city with a high sex drive and confident sexual attitude / ethics, then 'Girl with a one track mind' is a nice short distracting read, but I didn't feel as if I'd learnt anything about social mores, or modern attitudes to sex from reading the book itself, more from other people's responses to the book.

Perhaps the story of what it was like being 'outed' by the press as a sex blogger would make for a more interesting read.

The one positive thing I did take away from reading this book is that a modern woman can remain single, have guilt free, fulfilling casual sex, and not have to justify it to anyone - right up until the point that she chooses not to anymore.… (mere)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/722523.html

Many of us who write blogs like to occasionally fantasise that there may some day be a market for our words of wisdom. (Of course, some who write blogs are already established professional writers, so this does not apply to them.) Very few, however, manage to make the transition from blogger to published author on the basis of what is in their blog; I doubt very much that my book reviews from here will ever appear in dead tree form in your local bookshop.

Of course, that's because I write about books I have read, and occasionally sf cons I have been to, or arguments I have had, or speeches I have made, and not about sex. The Girl With A One Track Mind has written a very entertaining blog about the sex she has had for the last couple of years, and managed (somehow strangely) to persuade a publisher to take it on, and here it is.

And it is an entertaining, in some ways rather a moral read. Sex with strangers, or semi-strangers, is not always satisfactory. Wildly successful sex does not necessarily lead to a wildly successful relationship. By the end of the book, she is firming up her ideas about what she wants from a long-term partner. In that way, the novel format is more sustainable than the blog - done properly, as it is here, it imposes a duty on the author of character development, of story arc rather than the episodic narrative we get from the blog.

The Sunday Times wrote an incredibly spiteful article exposing the author's real identity - typical of the trash rag it is (a friend of mine who was briefly its foreign correspondent had to help the then foreign editor work out where the Balkan states were, one of many events that I thought Evelyn Waugh had invented for Scoop). However, she has since made a few more media appearances on her own terms. Let's hope that her fears of being finished in her film industry career are exaggerated, and that she continues to write entertainingly and for profit.… (mere)