A Round-Heeled Woman
Jane Juska’s ad in the New York Review of Books drew immediate attention from many older men. It said, "Before I turn 67 - next month - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works with me."
The responses she soon received wouldn’t stop. She separated them into three files: no, maybe and yes. It was the beginning of correspondence between Jane and men of all ages, through letters, phone calls, or e-mail. One of the men she chose was over 80 years old, she later learned, while another was the same age as her son.
Jane was born in 1933 and grew up in a small Mennonite town in Ohio. Her mother was absorbed in tennis and other sports, but Jane was more in love with her father, a local doctor, whom she thought was the handsomest man in town. After graduating from high school, she went to college to major in English. She later began teaching in a high school in California. She taught English for more than 40 years, first in a high school, and later in a college and a prison.
But years before her teaching career began, Jane became pregnant and she and her husband moved back to Ohio to live with her parents. Then when her son was only four months old, Jane’s mother died, and she became the housewife for her father and jobless husband. Only after she and her husband were divorced did she take her son and move back to Berkeley, California.
After Jane’s son had grown up and left home, she became a semi-retired teacher and decided to make up for the sex she had missed during her teaching years. In response to her ad, several prospective lovers traveled to California, but she visited the majority of them in New York. Most of her friends accepted her newest adventure, and even her grown son had no objections. But each affair usually put her back on her psychiatrist’s couch, where she realized that "Falling out of love is a lot harder than falling in."
Jane Juska’s approach to sex in her memoir is both humorous and refreshing, though some readers might think otherwise. She seemed to have two main interests in her life. She was devoted to her teaching, and the chapter about her English class at San Quentin prison is a good example. Her second interest was sex, as a normal function and pleasure "unencumbered by love", which came in later years and sent her after men who were usually as well-read as she.
The title of her book, A Round-Heeled Woman, actually means a promiscuous woman. But if Jane Juska’s expository writing is given the credit it deserves, she is much more than a round-heeled woman. A Round-Heeled Woman was published in 2003.