Publishers Weekly
01/22/2024
Playwright Warden debuts with a brutally honest if overlong account of a 30-something woman’s sex life in London. After the unnamed narrator’s parents separated and her mother moved to San Francisco, she came up with an equation to have a successful relationship and believes that marriage with children has a zero percent success rate. Her third “proper” relationship—with Three, a man she met while bartending at 24—follows all of the expected patterns until sex with him becomes physically painful. No matter what they try, the narrator has trouble getting aroused, and she begins to dread sex. After multiple doctor appointments and physiotherapy, the problem is still not resolved and she begins to look for alternative aphrodisiacs, such as flirting with strangers and snorting cocaine. As the years pass with Three she worries about the consequences of breaking her own rules. Though there are flashes of stylistic flair, such as recurring pages of scorecard-like “Top Humps,” in which the narrator rates her former lovers on “general vibe” and other factors, too often Warden’s prose reads like run-on journal entries (“Three was the best male person I had ever come across. EVER. And all my bits worked with his bits very well in a very exciting manner”), and the frankness rarely leads to deep insights. Fleabag this is not. Agent: Laura Bonner, WME. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR FROM THE BBC
“A viscerally vulnerable, raw and relatable, intensely intimate novel for our times. Genuinely new, bold and fascinating. Anoushka Warden is a true talent and a real artist.”
—Deborah Frances White, author and host of The Guilty Feminist podcast
“There is a fantastically compulsive quality to Anoushka Warden’s writing and her fictional world, as shockingly funny as it is tender and revealing about love, relationships, sex and womanhood. It is not only a book that speaks to so many young women today but also a candid, fun and moving read.”
—Arifa Akbar, former literary editor of the Independent, currently chief theatre critic at The Guardian
“Warden’s novel about a woman who unapologetically wants to live by her own rules feels really radical. The character’s fight against a world that wants to contain her is often very funny, sometimes painful, and highly unique. Warden's writing about sex is among the most daring I’ve read, centering female desire and sexuality while never being scared of embracing its messiness.”
—Jessie Thompson, Arts Editor, Independent
Kirkus Reviews
2024-01-05
A young Londoner comes to grips with her sexual and emotional needs in a tale full of cheeky British humor.
While navigating two major relationships, the unnamed narrator tries to answer the question of how to be fully oneself while in love. Her life is centered on eating, shopping, and sex—there are graphic discussions of how her “fanny” operates—and initially it seems full of familiar if extreme romantic hijinks. (Think Carrie Bradshaw meets Bridget Jones on cocaine.) A successful office administrator, she offsets her frequent emotional disarray by getting organized with the lists and manifestos that sprinkle the narration. By her mid-20s, she had slept with 24 and a half men, whom she rates on her Top Humps list by averaging her attraction to them via her fanny and brain. Then she meets “Three,” her third “proper boyfriend,” who rates a 9 out of 10 on both scales. They share affectionate emails, mouthwatering meals, and for a while great sex. Then she begins to find intercourse physically painful and develops questionable coping tools, including coke and dodgy flirtations to mask her sexual discomfort/uninterest. She even lets him talk her into marrying him, but, inevitably, the relationship collapses. In the messy aftermath, she faces the fact that she’s broken two of the three life rules she’s always clung to: no marriage, no children, no cheating. She also divulges a major secret that she’s been hiding from readers, thus beginning a pattern of delayed revelation that gives the novel a sharper, darker edge. The issue becomes not whether she is to be believed in any given moment, but whether she is more troubled than she lets on. As she describes her next love affair, with the appealing man she calls “X,” it’s painful to witness her attempt to be a more mature lover by sticking to new lists of impossible rules. Since X brings his own baggage, she ends up confronting increasingly painful truths, his and hers. An ambiguous ending leaves room for speculation about her romantic future, or maybe a sequel.
Underneath jokes and racy limericks beats a strong if conflicted heart that creates a surprisingly affecting novel.
