Sleeping Around by Catherine Townsend (2007) Paperback

By Catherine Townsend

"Sexy, confident and brimming with attitude." Cosmopolitan The provocative international bestseller, published in 8 countries, finally comes home to the U.S. Catherine Townsend leaves her martini... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0719563518
• ISBN13: 9780719563515
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: John Murray
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

It is what it claims to be!

The title of this book is "Sleeping Around," and you get what you came for. I wasn't familiar with Townsend's work prior to this book, and I suspect that much of the book is taken from her British sex column of the same name. Townsend grew up in the American south and, in her mid-20s, after graduating from NYU, followed her lifelong dream of moving to London where she worked as a freelance writer. This book chronicles her dating life... and adventures. Although she's very frank - and very adventurous - she somehow manages to come off as likeable, sincere, and earnest. Even as she's, well, sleeping around, she's forthright about wanting to be in a relationship and find her soulmate eventually. She's not sexually adventurous as some sort of "women can act like men!" political statement, nor is she doing it out of insecurity; she's just a person who knows what she likes from her sexscapades and isn't shy about getting it. Ultimately, though, what makes this book a good read is that she's a talented writer. Her experiences are titillating when they're supposed to be, they're engaging, they're witty, and they rarely ring with that faux-dialogue that can plague memoirs (full of what you *should* have said rather than what you did say). She manages to be appropriately self-deprecating at times while never veering to either insecurity or cockiness. And even her sexual adventures walk the line perfectly: slightly beyond what most people will try/admit to trying, while never veering so far into the kinky/fetish as to isolate her more conservative readers. She brings in just enough of her non-sexual personal life to show that she's a well rounded person who isn't solely focused on sex, but she also maintains the book's theme tightly so that you never feel like you're reading a self-aggrandizing memoir of someone who's only recently reached adulthood, full of too-mature aphorisms. If you're looking for a highbrow story with a deep meaning, perhaps this isn't the volume for you. But if you're looking for an interesting memoir, I enjoyed it and you may very well, too.