The Wild Oats Project: One Woman’s Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost

In this frank, salacious work delineating her desperate attempt at emotional and sexual liberation, the Scranton, Penn., author and frustrated wife ultimately recognizes that she lost a great deal and gained little. As an editor at San Francisco’s lifestyle magazine 7 x 7, married for 10 years to Scott, a successful, though emotionally opaque entrepreneur (“His erection was solid and dependable, just like him”), dealing with her childhood of parental alcoholism and brutality, and facing childlessness by her mid-40s, Rinaldi resolved to contemplate an open marriage when her husband took the decisive step to get a vasectomy rather than have children. Rather surprisingly, he agrees to the arrangement, and while the couple spends the weekdays together at their shared home near the Castro, Rinaldi gets a studio and begins a dizzying round of Nerve.com dates that fulfill her need for sexual exploration, though she sets firm perimeters in terms of emotional attachment. Luckily, in San Francisco, she notes wryly that “polyamory wasn’t all that rare,” and she gravitates toward the “urban commune” called OneTaste, which conducts hands-on orgasm meditation (OM) seminars for men and women, and where Rinaldi ultimately finds her most satisfying lovers—also women. To her credit, Rinaldi does not hide the dark side to this odyssey—her own jealousy at Scott’s lover, her absolute self-absorption and mendacity—but her ability to grasp its soul-driving necessity without insisting on winning over her readers renders this a notable work of self-knowledge. (Mar)