Sleeping Around: Flings and Faux Pas of An American Girl in London

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 swilling life as a New York City gossip columnist to find love and adventure in London with her amazing new boyfriend. But she gets dumped, and literally kicked to the curb. Jobless, homeless and on the rebound, she puts her wild sexual encounters--the good, the bad and the gnaw-your-arm-off-at-the-elbow-ugly--into good use by putting them in a dating column. She learns the difference between US and UK versions of 'monogamy', the going rate of male escorts, which dildos are dishwasher friendly, and the etiquette of sex parties (Rules No 1: Don't Discuss politics. Or plastic surgery.) But while she's working her way through intelligent dinner dates followed by no-strings-attached hot sex, she's also looking for love. Can she combine sleeping around with searching for a soul mate?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1402222823
• ISBN13: 9781402222825
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Sourcebooks Inc
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.8"

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.