"This book is not the kind where you get tempted to re-read it. This is actually an art by Blake Crouch. Though, contrary to other Blake Crouch's works, the climax can be revealed when you cross 50% of the story, but it's mind-blowing how he managed to make me sit until the last page.
Humans�� greed, delusion, lust, temptations, and tragic thoughts before they die are perfectly depicted here. It's a must-read for any horror-thriller fan. The timeline of the book is very easy to follow; two different timelines, with similar incidents happening, are taking place without overlapping each other.

Out of all the 20+ characters, I feel pretty bad about Lana. She didn't deserve such a husband, a life, and an ending, and she probably had the worst ending of all the other characters in my opinion. Lana is born to end in a tragedy, I guess, and the only good thing that happened in Lana's life is Joss. Abigail, in other words, is a very smart and strong woman, and I am happy that she had the chance to escape.

On the negative side, from a non-native English-speaking background, I feel like the colloquial spoken English used by the townspeople was difficult to follow."

"All right so this is not the book I thought it was when I got it, and I apologise for a rating that would surely be higher if I were part of the target audience. I was hoping it was a survey of the latest scientific research into arousal disorders and sexuality; in fact, it's a very selective presentation of those pieces of research that are considered helpful in ‘promoting women's sexual well-being, autonomy and pleasure��. Studies, however revealing, which do not promote such things are ignored. In other words, the book is primarily therapy, not science. Perhaps not surprising given that the author is a sex therapist, but I hadn't realised that �� I thought she was a researcher.

I've been very intentional about the empirical details I've included or excluded. I asked myself, “Does this fact help women have better sex lives, or is it just a totally fascinating and important empirical puzzle?��

And I cut the puzzles.

This means that, although there is some useful information here, it is interspersed with a lot of rather irritating, vaguely encouraging bullshit about ‘living with confidence and joy inside your body��, reassurances that you are ‘all normal, all beautiful��, and exhortations to ‘listen with your heart, not with your fear��. Naturally as a British passport-holder I cannot read this stuff without feeling my toes clench and my testicles retract into my body, and the narrative tone doesn't help either. Nagoski writes in the earnest, chatty way of someone trying to write a book for people who don't read books, with lots of forcedly colloquial comments like, ‘Wait: what?�� and, ‘For realsie real.��

OK, fine, I am clearly not the target audience, I get that, but for me it gets incredibly grating when every hint of scientific information is hedged around with encouragements and stupid metaphors and open condescension: before a section on the hedonic centres of the mesolimbic cortex (which Nagoski calls ‘your emotional One Ring��), she warns, ‘It gets pretty nerdy here […] Ready? Okay��, and afterwards pats us on the head by asking, ‘Did you make it? Phew! That was the hard part. Nice job.�� Gee thanks, Dr Nagoski!

Aristophanes, in Plato's Symposium—and for those of you who very understandably just fell asleep, replace that with the song “The Origin of Love�� from John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Itch—offers this parable about why humans love��

Really? What I found so infuriating about all this is the implied gendering of her tone �� it's somehow pitched at a certain idea of women, as though they have no interest in hard science and need their research presented in the form of a Cosmo quiz. It's really outrageous; I don't know if I should be taking it as some reflection on the state of US science education, but the total horror of any scientific terminology, combined with the girlfriends-chatting-over-a-Manhattan tone, just left a really bad taste in the mouth. (Men come off no better �� Nagoski writes that she has to ‘translate the science of women's sexual well-being into Manly Fix-It Dude-Speak�� to talk to her clients' partners��.)

The reason this is so frustrating is that the actual research presented is pretty important and, in some cases, not so well known. The two presiding ideas in the book, I think, are the concept of responsive v. spontaneous desire, and the dual control model of sexual arousal. The terms ‘responsive desire�� and ‘spontaneous desire�� have been floating around for over a decade now �� I think the key paper was (although Nagoski says they were coined by Ellen Laan and Stephanie Both, which may be true; Laan is one of the authors of that paper). The basic idea is that while some people can get turned on while walking down the street or doing the dishes, for others it's something that only happens in response to situations that have already been made explicitly erotic. Arousal first, desire second.

The disparity between these different kinds of desire is, of course, behind a lot of relationship stresses, whence Nagoski's clinical interest. For her what's important here is to point out that responsive desire is perfectly OK and is not the same as ‘low desire��.

A woman can be perfectly normal and healthy and never experience spontaneous sexual desire. Instead, she may experience ‘responsive�� desire, in which her desire emerges only in a highly erotic context.

She writes ‘a woman�� �� and there may well be a sex divide. Nagoski estimates (on somewhat shaky data, because research into this is limited) that five percent of men and thirty percent of women have responsive desire, compared with seventy-five percent of men and five percent of women whose desire is ‘spontaneous��. (This leaves most women and twenty percent of men whose desire style changes based on the context �� a rather large amount which does slightly throw the whole model into question. Asexuality is not addressed.) Nagoski is understandably worried about the idea that sexual desire which differs from the male norm is pathologised as ‘broken�� or defective in some way, something to be ‘fixed�� by taking a so-far-mythical pill; she wrote back in February on this subject.

It's all good stuff and it's certainly a vocabulary that more people should have at their disposal. However, it should be noted that other models of sexual desire are available. It's also worth saying that all we are really doing here is playing semantics. Thinking about responsive desire as a thing might help people to feel better about themselves and not to feel broken �� which is good, and they're not �� but it doesn't really say anything about what's actually going on. What affects whether desire is spontaneous or responsive? Hormones? Neurology? Upbringing? Culture?

(This semantics issue is something the whole book suffers from �� same goes for her long and heartfelt rant about why we do not have a sex ‘drive�� but rather an ‘incentive motivation system��. For the life of me after reading that section several times, I couldn't work out what the difference was supposed to be.)

Even more than responsive desire, Nagoski is excited about something called the Dual Control Model of Arousal. This is the idea developed by two researchers at the Kinsey Institute in 2006 (the paper's ) and essentially what it does is to consider libido in terms of those psychosomatic processes that promote sexual arousal, and in terms of those that restrain it. The paper posits a Sexual Excitation System (SES) on the one hand, and a Sexual Inhibition System (SIS) on the other; Nagoski calls them the accelerators and the brakes. The SES is that part of you that constantly scans your thoughts and the world around you for sexually-relevant data; the SIS is �� not inhibitions in the layman's sense, but a necessary consideration of negative consequences of any sexual activity, whether medical, social, psychological or whatever.

Conceptualising things in this way turns out to add quite a lot of nuance to how we think about arousal. People with arousal problems differ fundamentally in where the issue lies: some have a low SES (i.e. not many things actually turn them on in principle), while others have a very rich SES but just a highly sensitive inhibition system which stops them reacting as fully as they otherwise might, unless conditions are ideal. Similarly, sexual risk-taking like unprotected sex, cheating and so on, is sometimes correlated with low SIS and sometimes with abnormally high SES.

Nagoski very sensibly suggests that a prerequisite to overcoming arousal problems is understanding one's own SES and SIS �� getting familiar with what exactly it is that turns you on and turns you off, and creating contexts where the former are maximised and the latter minimised. There are lots of interesting studies that bear on these ideas in various ways. It was found, for example, that wearing socks made it easier for women to orgasm while masturbating in a brain imaging machine. This is not because there are more sock fetishists than previously appreciated, but simply because it's distracting if you have cold feet, and depending on your personal SIS little distractions of this kind can add up fast (especially, one presumes, when trying to get off inside a brain imaging machine).

It's clear that Nagoski wants to back up her ideas by using interviews with her clients, to demonstrate how helpful these concepts can be. And some interviews like this would indeed have been great �� books like Brett Kahr's Sex and the Psyche show how well clinical transcripts can work in books of this kind. But, pleading confidentiality issues, Nagoski instead invents fictional couples who she says are composites of the many people she has treated in real life, and the book is interspersed with transcripts of how these fictional people were fictionally treated. Reading these made-up conversations with made-up couples, who nod and gasp appropriately at all her revelations, is an exercise in pure frustration.

There were times when I wanted to throw this book across the room, and it's only thanks to the good fortune that I was reading it on my iPad that I was forced to press on. Nevertheless, there are small parts of it that I'd like to cut out and circulate to everyone I know, so it is an odd mix. Parts of the book, I mean, not my iPad. Nagoski is after all basically coming from the right place and talking about the right things, and she's not afraid of making some big claims for her field either.

Do I think that living with confidence and joy and respecting everyone's sexual autonomy could play a role in preventing cancer, solving the climate crisis, or building world peace? Yes, actually.

No way I can one-star a book saying something as close to my heart as that. And I guess if what you want is something therapeutic rather than just informative, then this will fit the bill pretty well. Still, despite all the interesting material to be uncovered in here, it is hard to shake off the vague feeling that you're getting a lecture on sexual dysfunction from a children's television presenter.

(Oct 2015)"