Love Me! One Woman’s Search for a Different Happy Ever After

Is finally published. Thank you to everyone who is reading it.

For the last four years I’ve been writing a book about love and sex.

Love Me! One Woman’s Search for a Different Happy Ever After starts with me single and forty and recovering from yet another romantic failure. Embarrassed and ashamed that I couldn’t seem to do this thing that other people do - fall in love, get married etc - I set out to find out why. Is it because there is something wrong with me? Or… is it because there are different ways to live life and maybe I’m meant to live a different kind of life?

But while I’ve always been ambivalent about being in partnership - I have wanted good sex. Great sex. Beautiful sex. And so the book starts with me going in search of that too. Can I, as a middle aged Catholic school girl, get over my hang ups and have a beautiful sex life? Even as a single woman? If so how?

The book follows me though tantra retreats and pussy gazing (it’s a thing, I would say google but God knows what that would throw up). I read all the relationship books and meet people living in different ways. I have Skype sex and consider getting married to myself (again, a real thing called ‘sologamy’)

The book includes the sentence ‘I don’t know what to do with a penis.’ This was the most embarrassing thing I could think of writing and I wrote it. Now I keep repeating it in interviews, like some kind of penis Tourette’s. I might not know what to do with a penis but people don’t know what to do with their face when I tell them this.

I can laugh now but wading through my shame while living alone in lockdown was not a giggle.

As well as my own shame, I imagined everyone else’s. For four years I imagined family being mortified. I imagined the Guardian annihilating the sex scenes. I imagined colleagues writing me off. I imagined friends not being able to look at me.

The book came out a few weeks ago.

And guess what? People don’t hate it. Mum says I’m the bravest person she knows and that it’s an important book. My aunts - who I thought would be mortified - are telling me they are proud and in awe that I’m writing about things that even today are unspoken. One is surprised I’m funny. Ha!

Old school friends - the ones who were popular with boys and seem to have it all going in - have told me they relate to my sexual insecurities. They are passing the book on to their daughters. Women in their fifties and sixties are telling me they wish they’d read this book twenty years ago. Men are reading it too. Several people say they have signed up to the tantra retreat I’ve written about.

The Guardian, fortunately, has not analysed my sex scenes.

But many other papers have written about it, mostly very favourably. I got a mention in the FT this weekend, featured in an article in the Times about the new wave of sexually open books written by women and was voted number two best book on sex and relationships by Cosmo. Fifteen year old me would have had her mind blown by that.

More mind blowing is the way people are responding to it. At least once a day I get a message which starts with some version of ‘I can’t quite put into words what this book means to me….’ and ends with ‘Thank you for writing it.’

I am so grateful, proud and relieved.

So THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has bought the book, listened to it on Audible and Spotify and who has taken the time to message me with your thoughts and feelings.

I know there are so many conversations about this to be had, and so much more for me to write. I’m laid up at the moment with long covid. I’m being referred to the covid clinic (like Studio 54 but for people who all nap together?) and so I am having to trust that the book will find its way without me doing quite as much hyping as I’d like to.

That said, the next post will be about how it feels to have your sex life on the cover of the Daily Mail.

LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE.

mx

Ps health allowing, I’m doing an event in London this Thursday evening. Please come. There will be books for sale and also signing. I’ll be interviewed by the very funny Rosie Wilby, author of two books on relationships and host of The Breakup Monologues podcast.

PPS if anyone has read it and liked it, please do leave a comment on Goodreads, amazon or social, if you can. It really helps. And for those who found it unbearable, feel free to keep that to yourself! xx