Jane Juska, author of bestselling memoir of sex as an older woman, dies at 84

Her son, Andy Juska, told the San Francisco Chronicle his mother died on 24 October at a care facility in Chico, after an illness.

Juska was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1933 and raised in small-town Ohio. Educated at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley, she raised her son alone after a divorce in 1970. She taught English in high school, college and San Quentin state prison.

She was retired and volunteering at Planned Parenthood when she wrote her 2003 book, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. The title came from an archaic term for a promiscuous woman.

The book grew out of a personal ad Juska placed in the New York Review of Books in 1999. Inspired by an Eric Rohmer film, Autumn Tale, it read: “Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Speaking to the New York Times in 2003, she said that before she sent the ad she thought to herself: “What harm might this decision cause other people? The only person that would be is my son. So I asked him, and he said: ‘Go get ’em, Mom. It’s your turn.’ The night I sent the ad in I felt so great.”

The ad prompted 63 replies. She spent a year following them up before writing the book, she said, because she “didn’t want to think, ‘What if I never had sex with a man again?’”

The flings with men of all ages changed her life, she said.

“I had no hope of it turning out to be anything like this,” she told the Times. “I expected to be murdered, or made sad at the very least. But I never expected to have intimate friendships with extraordinary men.

“True, I’ve met some men who are not kind or thoughtful, but I’ve also met men who are kind and thoughtful and funny and true. Which is to say, I guess I found out that men are people.”

SSPinterest

 Sharon Gless as Jane Juska, on stage at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 2011. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Her book was originally written as fiction. Turned into a humorous memoir on the advice of one of the men she met through her ad, it was a hit and landed her on television with Oprah Winfrey and Charlie Rose.

Source: theguardian