Unmastered A book on desire, most difficult to tell

Review by Booklist Review

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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this thinking woman's meditation on sexual desire, Angel challenges readers to consider whether feminism has actually liberated women to lay claim to their own desire and satisfaction. Her intellectual touchstones include Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, and Michel Foucault, and Angel sprinkles quotations from their writings throughout the book to emphasize and illuminate her own ideas. The narrative-ghostly and poetic at its strongest-charts the course of Angel's affair with an unnamed man. Her passion for him erupts onto the page, often in the form of a sentence or two separated from its neighbors by copious white space, an unconventional style that mirrors the dynamic nature of sexual tension and release. Meanwhile, she contemplates a variety of issues associated with her physical desire: she admits to an interest in pornography, but acknowledges that her definition of it might differ from someone else's; she asks her lover to tie her up, but he only does so later when she hasn't asked; flashing back to another affair in the book's most moving section, she describes terminating an unplanned pregnancy. In the end, Angel doesn't offer up any pat answers to her questions because she knows that none exist; desire, like liberation, is individual-not universal. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (June 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A revealing look at postmodern feminism and its role in female desire through one woman's personal anecdotes, meditations and professional research. Angel provides an intelligent examination of how today's women satiate their needs and desires. The author examines her own sexual experiences as both a writer and a lover, from her teen years to the present, in poetic yet fragmented theories revolving around the feminist icons Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. This is not to say that her philosophy leans toward the bias of these women; rather, she uses their thoughts as examples and builds on them to answer an important question that many women face in some form or another: "What is it to define, or even to know, our desiresto identify which are our own, and which result from a kind of porousness?" The definition of this identification of desire within oneself, the desire for women to be able to freely speak up about what they really want and how they want it is answered through Angel's own emotional bonding to the modern woman's intuitive feelings of shame, beauty, and confusion of sex or lust for love. Throughout the book, structured as a numbered series of vignettes, short paragraphs and even single sentences, the author struggles with her personal convictions regarding love and lust in and out of the bedroom. However, she staunchly maintains her theory with an empowering conclusion that begs for women to speak up above the commercialized version of sex and the woman's perceived notion of what it takes to fulfill their desires. "The desire to speak is a desire to burst through silence, to puncture," she writes. "As such, it is also erotic; it contains its own excitement. Speaking undoes the perceived straitjacketing. Unlaces the corset, winds down the hair." An unconventional and strikingly lyrical observation of women and their desire to speak regarding the fulfillment of their sexual and emotional needs.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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I 1. Nearly ten years ago, in that sweltering summer, that heat wave summer, when to walk just half a mile meant a sticky sheen of sweat, I developed a phobia of moths. * * * I had never liked them, my nervousness shaped no doubt by my mother's fear of the things. Her brother used to breed huge African specimens in their East Anglia home; they would fly up at her, startled, out of her shoes, her bedclothes. And then there was a teenage summer spent in a Gothic pile in France, where hordes of angry bees rattled behind the chimney, and disconcerting noises-off unsettled the most rational of family and guests. Fat armies of sated flies and flotillas of dark, wide moths appeared every night in a bedroom in which my sister eventually refused to sleep. * * * When the stay was over--but only then--we speculated giddily about dead bodies under floorboards. * * * So far, so manageable. But when that heat wave brought fatter, more alien moths to a tiny university town where I was deeply in love, and caught in the headlights of a Ph.D., dislike burgeoned into something else: an all-consuming terror whenever one would flap and flutter into view. Its blurry agitation would have me darting across a room before I knew what I was doing. Once, I leapt out of a shower in panic as one frantically ricocheted around the folds of a curtain. Out like a shot, I stood dripping shampoo on the hall carpet. The worst prospect: a moth sticking itself to my wet skin. It might disintegrate. A wing would be detached from a body; several different bits of moth might be stuck to me. * * * Dead, dismembered moth. * * * I went to a friend's next door to rinse my hair. * * * There was a phase of nervously checking, at arm's length, the curtains in my bedroom before sleep, poised to sprint from the scene should one rise from the lurid floral pattern. The pleasure of open windows on summer evenings was fraught with danger: those awful things, drawn to the light. Static, embracing a wall, they were almost worse, for they would inevitably move, taking disorganized, fitful flight. And when they were immobile one could see, if one dared look, their dreadful texture, their vile components. * * * I dreamt, once, of one pinning me down on the stone slabs of a suburban garden. It settled softly on me, trapping me under its insect blanket. * * * The wings--warm and dark, flimsy but strong. The furry texture of the body. * * * Those fucking moths. Copyright © 2012 by Katherine Angel Excerpted from Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell by Katherine Angel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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