Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex

In this no-holds-barred collection of essays by "real women" about "real sex," Jong has assembled an eclectic group of authors: Fay Weldon's "My Best Friend's Boyfriend," about losing her virginity to her best friend's boyfriend at college not long after the end of WWII is witty and poignant; Eve Ensler pens a charming, rhythmic triologue in which three women muse longingly, and poetically, on their sexual pasts and fantasies ("Sometimes it's driving on the mad / Italian speedway at a thousand miles / Your face buried in his jeans"); Marisa Acocella Marchetto sketches a "Graphic Fantasy" about the adventures of a woman with a penis; gossip columnist Liz Smith divulges that her first cousin was the first man with whom she "went all the way"; Honor Moore writes a sexy, fragmented essay, spliced with quotes from the "taboo" Story of O: "...O tried to figure out why there was so much sweetness mingled with the terror in her, or why her terror seemed itself so sweet..." Early in the book, Susan Cheever muses that "sex tells the truth"; this collection is at its most profound when truth illuminates sex as a force in which these women found empowerment. (June)