“I felt twitches in my vagina, pleasurable
contractions. It was a sunny Sunday
morning in spring, two years after I had stopped seeing Adam”.
Now I’m no prude but I think Susie Orbach’s The Impossibility of Sex wins the
dubious award of having the worst opening paragraph I’ve ever read. To put things into context, the protagonist –
a therapist - is alone in her kitchen, chopping fennel and thinking about a
former patient (or ‘analysand’ if you want to use the professional lingo). I imagine a woman in her forties wearing a
long skirt made out of hemp, indulging in a detached fantasy about Adam “a
fornicator, a lover, a stud”, then giving a smug little laugh and wryly shaking
her head at herself for being so silly.
After the contrived and slightly icky start, it took me a
while to warm to the unnamed analyst narrating the stories of seven characters that
visit her for psychotherapy. Despite the
admission of illicit attraction within the first sentence, the perspective of
the therapist felt too contained and professional to ring true to me. This might be explained by the fact that
Susie Orbach is in real life a psychotherapist and therefore has a keen
interest in preserving the image of her and her colleagues as wholly empathic
and non-judgemental. Or maybe I just
wrongly presume that everyone is as cynical as me. Note,
don’t seek counsel from a lawyer.
Soon enough, the fascinating subject matter of how the inner
worlds of people are constructed and how these affect their relationships
and actions engrossed me. I kept a
pencil between the pages of the book to underline bits of truth and wisdom as they
arose. I appreciated Orbach’s somewhat experimental
style, attempting to combine narrative with psychoanalytical theory. This might distance some readers but I found
that it nicely balanced my emotional engagement with the stories and my desire
for more general clinical information about the psychological challenges facing
the characters.
On an interesting side note, Orbach – currently Jeneatte
Winterson’s partner – describes herself as “post-heterosexual”. I very much like that description and the way
it neatly side-steps the ‘usual’ tick-box categories of sexuality.
The Impossibility of Sex - 3.5 feathers.
