No Sex and the City

The Art of Sleeping Alone by Sophie Fontanel, tr Linda Coverdale. Review by Jayne White

I first heard about this book through a Telegraph article back in April. It caught my interest because of the subject matter of celibacy. I'm afflicted by both chronic illness and catholicism, and these have been key influences in my living with celibacy for prolonged periods in a society which tends to view it as abnormal and often suspect. Despite the article's rather gauche dribbling over the chic-ness and elegance of the French woman who wrote it - why do so many journalists do this? - the book sounded as though it might have something interesting to say. I impulsively preordered it and promptly forgot all about it until it arrived on my kindle on publication day.

“For a long while, and I really don’t wish to say when it was or how many years it lasted, I chose to live in what was perhaps the worst insubordination of our times: I had no sex life.”

So far, so good. Unfortunately this is the first sentence and it goes downhill pretty rapidly from here. The book is said to be in the form of a series of vignettes. My french is less than good, but if vignette translates as ‘a shortish, badly written filler article from a women's magazine’, then I'm not quarrelling with that description. There are two articles which have a directness about them and lack the ostentation found in the rest of the book. In the first she looks back on her first sexual experience, non-consensual, when she was thirteen, and in the follow-on she tells her friend about it, two years later. She's very matter of fact when talking about this, openly admitting that she tried to seduce the man, but then took fright when she was in his hotel room. When she talks to her friend she re-invents the experience in a positive light. These pieces frustrated me - if she can write decently, why on earth is the majority of the book so bad?

Sophie is dissatisfied with physical relationships. She feels that there's a big divide between what she experiences and how she thinks sex should be. It's hard to feel sympathy for her. She travels from city to city with perfect accessories and important friends. She wants Michelin-starred sex every time. She's like a woman who wants to eat at The Fat Duck every day and has forgotten that the best chips are those you pinch from your significant other and that some hungers are just made for warm buttered toast. 

Growing tired of her lover Sophie runs away on a ski-ing holiday. When she realises that she prefers an all-in-one ski suit and doesn't even want to sleep with the hotel owner she concludes that a life change to celibacy is in order. It's a bit more drama-queeny than that, but that is honestly the story. Physically at peace, she embarks on a new relationship with her bathtub.

My body, relaxed, would agree to float, and its most meaningful parts would emerge from the opaline water, my breasts up-thrust like buoys signaling a human presence along a seacoast. I was beneath these beacons, a living being. And soon the detente would continue as the other important part of my anatomy would rise, no longer mistreated as before.  The palm of a sorcerer had slid beneath my hips to gently raise me.

I only have a shower room in my flat - but that made me think. The inner peace doesn't seem to last long though, as two vignettes later she's listening to a radio doctor advising listeners that the more sex they have the better they will be as a person.  She rings up the radio station and rants at length at the young male telephone operator. I've managed fairly contented celibacy for years at a time, but at this point even I was thinking she needed to get laid.  Next she goes to the cinema to see a Robert Redford film. He might want his legal people to look at that bit and think about a restraining order.

The next group of articles deal with the reaction of her friends. Sophie's friends are a diverse group who are very open about their own wide ranging sexual practices. I think she is trying to shock her readership a little. She needn't have bothered for me. I'm far less shocked by swingers and transvestites than I am about her habit of serving up sentences which are missing their verbs. They are shocked by her new lifestyle and Sophie takes this in her stride in the relaxed manner we've come to expect.

I was discovering conventional behaviour in the most liberated milieus: broad-minded people, against any form of censorship or constraint, who boasted about how they pushed boundaries. Well, I blasted them back in the other direction, and they flung their hands up. They had ingested the most useless hodgepodge of drugs, blitzing themselves so completely that they'd forgotten I'd seen them do it, whereas I was mainlining the purest of ideals, of the very highest quality-and this shocked them.

It's hard not to observe that Sophie likes the attention she gets from sex and in her celibate state she has to play for attention for not having sex. So we then move through a stage where various friends try to introduce her to new men. My favourite is the retired 'star' she meets in a fancy restaurant.

 'I'm quite alone,' I ventured to say. 'And you?'

'Oh,' he said with a sigh, 'me, no one.' And added, 'Luckily, I have a Monet....'

I knew exactly what kind of sublimation he meant.

She also meets up with an old friend from University who she describes fondly:

She found sex to be such a natural thing.  Like breathing.  This attraction she felt for these pleasures came from a real gift she had: her talent for coming.  In Basel she would go out onto her balcony, caress the wood of the railing, and thank heaven for her sensuality, her appreciation for saliva, clotted cream, juices and bodies.

The friend invites her for a threesome. I too have fond memories of my student friends, but not that fond.  Maybe girltalk just isn't my thing. The attention from women is not a one-off and her friend Alex tries to persuade her to experiment. Eventually, thank God, the tide begins to turn. She visits India and has a series of appointments with a masseur called Pajane and suddenly the whole world is brighter.

A little faun destined for delight had been crouched waiting inside me, having hidden under a chest of drawers during my great invasions. Now the faun was coming back to life.

Back in Paris she tells a stranger in a restaurant that she been receiving 'insinuating vibrations'. Before we know where we are she's picked up a married man in her car and taken him back to her place. Life is back to normal. What a relief. No more melodramatic pronouncements.

This book is valueless in terms of reflecting about celibacy. It's the story of a spoiled, rather promiscuous woman who needed a bit of a break from going from man to man. In her teens she'd got into a pattern of thinking 'adults can have sex, therefore if you're not having sex, you're not an adult'. She was so used to being appreciated for her sensuality first and foremost that she was freaking out when people started to see what was underneath. I don't know about you, but I've never gone through life expecting everyone  around me to appreciate and react directly to my sensuality. Could this be why I often find work meetings tedious? Maybe I should start to pout a bit or play with my hair when things get dull. I think in her case, a break to re-calibrate was a good idea.

There are positive aspects to celibacy - you have that little bit more headspace to support family and friends and you have a lot of independence and freedom which I've always valued. If you're ill, you can establish a routine and concentrate on your own needs. I don't regret the way I've lived and the choices I've made. Life is a journey. I've done a lot of it solo so far; that could change; I would never say never. However, the older I get, the fussier I get and if that means I end up alone, so be it.