The advice in the original, however, around open and non-judgemental communication about sex and sexual needs feels relevant to everyone. And Comfort acknowledges there are groups of people for whom other books are needed. Although his language around these issues is awkward under today's gaze, there is a broad acceptance of same-gender attractions (without citing any evidence Comfort happily claims everyone is bisexual) and aspects of gender fluidity.
Raymond Queneau’s 1947 book “Exercises in Style” famously demonstrated 99 different ways to tell the same story. One that did not make it in was the concept of recounting someone’s life through the pets that have loomed large in it — but Jennifer Finney Boylan’s “Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs” makes a resonant case that this approach might just work. It’s certainly effective here, with Boylan writing movingly about the dogs that she’s lived with from childhood through middle age.
“No one was a Nazi,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote about the end of World War II in Europe, mordantly recalling how all the Germans she met insisted they had hidden a Communist or were secretly half-Jewish. The photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White heard the phrase “We didn’t know!” with such “monotonous frequency” that it sounded “like a kind of national chant for Germany.”
In “Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955,” the Berlin-based journalist Harald Jähner is similarly skeptical, describing how the majority of surviving Germans were so preoccupied with their own suffering that the dominant mood was one of self-pity. “They saw themselves as the victims,” he writes, “and thus had the dubious good fortune of not having to think about the real ones.”
There is no page in this book, from the preface by Mary Heffernan of the OPW to the personal record of archivist Lucy Whiteside which does not offer entertainment, pleasure or, at the very least, information. And that includes the index.
His legacy as an intellectual is mixed, as is to be expected. Rosenberg provided a necessary counterbalance to both Communism and formalism but his contribution is not always easy to define. This biography does a good job at summarising Rosenberg the man and author and bringing to life his pivotal role in the American post-war intellectual scene.
Ultimately, her memoir is about what it is like not to have, nor even much to want, all the things that are supposed to make a woman complete. If it is wonderful to be free – to be the kind of unicorn that judges yourself, not according to the putrid benchmarks of a sexist society, but by your own standards – this doesn’t mean that it isn’t also, sometimes, painful.