When published, many people found this book shocking. I suspect that many people still would. I am not one of those. I didn't much like it because I simply wasn't interested. ( )

got this at pelican books in anacortes, began and finished on my flight

some beautiful ideas and i appreciate colettes honesty ( )

3.5 stars. This is sort of a collection of essays. Unlike much of Colette's work, it's almost unemotional and detached. ( )

3.5 stars. This is sort of a collection of essays. Unlike much of Colette's work, it's almost unemotional and detached.
I also forgot how very binary she was in her thinking about genders. There is a lot of emphasis on the "incompleteness" of women lovers. It is focused on the queer communities but not flattering. ( )

I picked up this used copy from the Book Burrow because I'd enjoyed Cheri and The Last of Cheri, and I'd gotten more curious about Colette herself after watching the trailer for her new biopic. I was expecting fiction, but instead got some blend of memoir/journalistic essays or a thinly fictionalized version of the same.

Here Colette (or "Colette?") sets as her subject love/romance/sex and the ways they are intwined with each other -- particularly among those whose romantic/sex lives deviated from the norms of the time. There are peeks into lesbian enclaves, communities of gay men, a conversation with a Don Juan type, a long piece on the Ladies of Llangollen. There is a thrill to get a glimpse at some of the sorts of lives that history has deliberately hidden from us -- but still Colette herself is hardly an impartial observer. She reveals much of herself along the way -- her own opinions on love, sex, and gender -- some of which are radical and liberating and some which a modern reader can't help wondering to what extent were limited by the views of the time. How much of her observations of lesbians, let's say -- is true to the nature of women and/or lesbians, and how much an artifact of how lesbians had to hide themselves and dissemble -- and how that must have shaped their lives even when in the limited communities where they were able to be "free" with themselves?

In short, Colette as a narrator is in turns charming, radically open-minded, empathetic to the point of excusing what seems like very bad behavior, but then sometimes surprisingly conservative. She is resolutely herself -- shaped by her own time in and among the communities she reveals here. And that is deeply intriguing. ( )