Radical Intimacy: Cultivate the Deeply Connected Relationships You Desire and Deserve

Kors, a sex and intimacy coach, offers new ways to consider and explore intimacy in her empowering debut. Grounding Kors’s guidance is her “Radical Intimacy Matrix,” a grid illustrating the intersections of “levels of intimacy” (“self,” “other,” and “world”) with “kinds of intimacy” (“emotional,” “physical,” and “energetic”). The author pulls from psychology, personal anecdotes, and client stories to explore the points of her matrix and offer advice on building romantic and platonic intimacy skills. For example, Kors suggests that being in touch with one’s emotions is a crucial precondition of developing emotional intimacy with others and shares exercises to grow this skill, such as thinking about one’s “highest high” and “lowest low,” as well as answering questions such as “where in your body does joy live?” Solo and partnered exercises designed to explore physical intimacy are explicit, detailed, and sometimes surprising (“walk barefoot” outside). Though Kors’s concept of “energetic intimacy” remains hazy, she exudes an easy mix of authority and willingness to meet readers where they are, and her exercises are detailed and easy to follow. Readers looking for a practical and thorough guide to getting closer would do well to start here. Agents: Jan Baumer and Steve Troha, Folio Literary. (Apr.)