Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M.

By Catherine Millet

Book Overview

Catherine Millet's best-selling The Sexual Life of Catherine M. was a landmark book - a portrait of a sexual life lived without boundaries and without a safety net. Described as "eloquent, graphic -- and sometimes even poignant" by Newsweek, and as " perhaps] one of the most erotic books ever written" by Playboy, it drew international attention for its audacity, and the apparently superhuman sangfroid required of Millet and her partner, Jacques Henric, with whom she had an extremely public and active open relationship. Now, Millet's follow-up answers the first book's implicit question: How did you avoid jealousy? "I had love at home," Millet explains, "I sought only pleasure in the world outside." But one day she discovered a letter in their apartment that made it clear that Jacques was seriously involved with someone else. Jealousy details the crisis provoked by this discovery, and Millet's attempts to reconcile her need for freedom and sexual liberation with the very real heartache that Jacques's infidelity caused. If The Sexual Life of Catherine M. seemed to disregard emotion, Jealousy is its radical complement: the paradoxical confession of a libertine who discovers that love, in any of its forms, can have a dark side.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802145191
• ISBN13: 9780802145192
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

changing places

how do we meet the persons who become important to us? this is the question millet first answers in `Jealousy', her circuitous memoir of a period in her life of her relationship with jacque henric, her lover and, later, husband. catherine millet, art critic and editor of the magazine, `Art News', admits to having an excellent visual memory and being comfortably adept in the world of visual images. her first impression of jacques pertains, anomalously, not to the eye but to the ear; she hears his voice on a tape machine played over the telephone. soon they are living together. jacques is a writer of the kind of texts dear to the french critical and philosophical intelligentsia. gracing the cover of `Perpetual Adoration', his best known novel, is a photo of gustave courbet's hirsute nude `The Origin of the World', the original painting once owned by jacques lacan. it is another explicit photo, one taken by henric of a naked pregnant woman to which he, possibly not so innocently, directs catherine, which begins her jealousy. catherine always enjoyed her sexual freedom as an innate faculty until she moved in with jacques, and then she began registering images of herself. she always was a daydreamer, but when she becomes jealous, a `paranoid archeologist', she ceases being heroine of her own daydreams and sexual fantasies, her former space in her dreams filled by the women with whom she believes jacques to be sleeping. millet undertakes her obsessional spying with such critical and analytical fervor that the reader suspects something darker lurking than jealousy. true, she does not want to see herself as susceptible to a fault as conventional as jealousy. would not jealousy appear to be a foreign emotion for a woman who engaged in orgies and what used to be called `free love'? but there it is, along with the sense of her sinking, slipping away from her life line, jacques. jealousy is what alerts her to the deeps pulling her away from him. she lacks emotion, she tells us, with her other sexual partners, but not with jacques, her primary partner. the women with jacques in her sexual fantasies are younger women, `very young girls', is how she describes them. millet is jealous of the women in her lover's life, she fears no longer being his primary lover. but it is not just the other women, she is also jealous of jacques' spaces and occupations which provide him equanimity, which he used to share with her. when she feels rejected by Jacques, when he becomes silent, and she's gripped in her own silence, her fantasies of jacques' sex life, she writes that she was destroyed. the middle aged millet does not compete with jacques' very young girls, instead she becomes more like jacques, adapting his silences, his note taking of her own sexual life, his analytical skills and returns to an analyst she visited earlier in her life, a decision possibly suggested by letters of henric she reads containing remarks by lacan. this is catherine