Ever since Adam and Eve covered their naked bodies, Judeo-Christian society has equated carnality with sin. In this vein, Corinthians admonished that it is better to marry than to burn, and Hester Prynne wore the scarlet letter A, so her Puritan neighbors would know her as an adulteress. William Blake mourned this repression in “The Garden of Love,” when he wrote, “And priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds/And binding with briars, my joys and desires.” One lady, late in life, determined to disregard “Thou shalt not.”
In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl; in the 1990s, Monica Lewinsky exposed Sex and the Married President; and in 2004, Jane Juska revealed Sex and the Senior. Jane Murback was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to father Edwin, a doctor, and mother Helen, a homemaker. The family relocated to Archbold, a small Ohio town, where many neighbors were Mennonites. Jane struggled for years to shed her Puritanical upbringing, and she eventually realized that “Pleasure was not bad.” She graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in English, and at a young age, she married Joe Juska, an employee of the federal government. The union produced only two positive results: an alliterative name and a son, Andrew. Her husband belittled her and “wanted me to collapse intellectually. Whether the topic was the weather, politics or rent, he was always argumentative.” After their divorce in the early 1970s, Jane moved to the more liberal zip code of Berkeley. Although she did not mourn the breakup, she said the loneliest she had ever been was when she was married, and she went through a bleak period. Juska gained seventy pounds, drank heavily, and was beside herself when Andrew dropped out of school and ran away from home. Jane underwent years of psychoanalysis, dieting, and mother-son reunion to quiet her demons. To support herself, Juska taught English for more than three decades at Ygnacio Valley High School, Saint Mary’s College, and San Quentin State Prison. In her spare time, she escorted women into abortion clinics to shield them from pro-life protestors. Dating was sporadic, and except for a couple of unhappy skirmishes, her relationships with men were nonexistent. Overwhelmed with making a living and raising a child on her own, she did not want to add a romantic complication into the mix.
Jane’s salvation had been her passion for teaching; however, after she retired, she found she “just wasn’t tired enough,” and, with Andrew gone (he became a forester), it dawned on her that she had gone three decades without sex. She tried to end the drought; however, despite senior hikes, senior birdwatching, senior mixes, and senior dances at church (which she no longer attended), by 7:00 p.m., she was alone and lonely.
At age sixty-six, Jane watched the French film Autumn Tale, a story in which a married woman secretly placed a personal advertisement in a newspaper for a widowed friend who believed it too late to find love. The film made a significant impact, leading Jane to reflect both on her enforced celibacy and her sadness that she had never realized her dream of publishing a book. Jane was determined to do something about the former, and this determination was the genesis of taking out a personal ad. First, she consulted Andrew, the only person’s censure about which she cared. His response, “Go get ’em, Mom. It’s your turn.” Her grandmother had warned her, “Don’t borrow trouble,” but she felt borrowing trouble was a good idea because “if you live your life staying safe, you’re going to lose.”
Of course, the retired schoolteacher was cognizant of the risks, as putting herself in the meeting-strangers arena could equate to Looking for Mr. Goodbar, but she felt an emotional death was no longer sustainable. Desirous of meeting a literary gentleman, she bought an ad in the personals section of the New York Review of Books. At the cost of $4.55 per word, she cut to the chase: “Before I turn sixty-seven next March, I would like a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Jane had debated about mentioning the British writer, as it added thirty dollars to the cost, yet left it in, as she felt it would establish her as an intellectual.
Juska expected two or three responses; sixty-three replies landed on her doormat, from men ranging from thirty-two to eighty-five, forwarded by the New York Review in manila envelopes. She divided these into piles of yes, no, and maybe; only those from men on life-support machines or with little sense of literary appreciation made the no pile. One man mailed a picture of himself wearing sunglasses and nothing else (Jane did not reply); another bore the message, “Have Viagra, will travel.” The letters yielded several dates which in turn yielded sexual encounters.
Like any dater, her experiences ran from the sublime to the ridiculous. In the latter category was Jonah, an eighty-something, and they shared a rendezvous at the Claremont Hotel. It ended with him stealing the champagne flutes and her silk pajama pants. John proved the proverbial charmer, as she found his literary foreplay irresistible: “Margaret Fuller. Margaret Atwood. Roth. Updike.” She spent a great deal of time and money travelling to the East Coast to meet dates because California guys did not pique her interest. She said the problem was not impotence or prostate problems; rather, her bone of contention was their lack of appreciation for the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. Jane fell in love with one of her paramours, Graham, or, as he called himself, Abelard, half her age, who had the body of an Adonis. For him, she disregarded the cardinal rule “Bros before hoes”―at least its female equivalent—when she broke arrangements with Meredith, her oldest friend, to spend a weekend with her Lysander in a log cabin.
After a year of living the sexual life, Jane decided to turn another fantasy into reality, and she set her sights on seeing her name on the spine of a book. Without any publishing connections, Mrs. Juska sent out her randy read. The top-rated William Morris Agency signed her on as a client. The book’s goal was to dispel the common misconception that postmenopausal women were not interested in the pleasures of the flesh, even if their flesh no longer possessed elasticity. Her 2003 memoir carried the title A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance; the name an archaic reference to a trollop, not Trollope, the British writer. The book is noticeable not only for its frankness about the intricacies of senior love, but also for the author’s honesty about her naked need for a physical relationship. Juska’s carnal odyssey was a precursor to E. L. James’s 2011 Fifty Shades of Grey, though Jane’s gray referred to lack of pigment, rather than a billionaire who was into bondage. Jane’s memoir, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, landed her on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah’s guest, with white hair tucked behind her ears, eyes alert behind her bifocals, was not the usual woman behind a sexual sensation. Juska kept clutching her back, and one assumed it was from arthritis until one remembered her extra-curricular activities. When another interviewer asked her if she practiced safe sex, Jane answered, “Well, not getting pregnant was part of my popularity.” The memoir also became the basis of a play performed in several cities. Legions read the best –seller, except Andrew, because it contained too much information about his mother’s life. It must also have provoked a great deal of staff-room conversation in her former schools, especially in the Catholic College. In a nod to changing the names to protect the innocent, Juska exercised discretion, and her boy toys became Danny the Priest, Jonah the Thief, Robert the Liar, and Sidney the Peculiar. Andrew said in an interview that he’d never read the book, and then added that, if someone else’s mother had written it, he would have done so.
After her book’s debut, elderly fans lionized the retired schoolteacher who found herself in the unlikely role of sex guru for a generation of wrinkled baby boomers. Her story, however graphic, was about more than the pleasures of the flesh, in the same way that Melville’s Moby Dick was about more than a madman’s quest for a white whale. It dealt with the need of seniors for connection, and how solitude is a gateway to death-in-life.
Mrs. Juska was an author in search of a sequel, and her second book was Unaccompanied Women: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate, which described her reinvented life as a seventy-two-year-old “senior sexpert.” It recounted her search for the perfect rental property (she lusted after her friends’ homes and longingly dreamed of owning her own). Her rented Berkeley cottage was too small and too expensive, and she worried the owners would be so shocked at her screams of Miltonian fulfillment, they would ask her to vacate. Man-hunting proved no less problematic, and she remained on the hunt for sex and romance, though she could not find anyone sexually compatible and six feet tall within a three-thousand-mile radius. Graham, her thirty-two-year-old New York City intellectual love, informed her via email that he had married a woman his age. Robert, her second favorite, ran off with her friend Ilse. Ms. Juska said of her heartache, “And I would like to say that that experience is no easier at sixty-seven than it is at seventeen. It’s just at sixty-seven, one has less time to get over it.” Jane’s irrepressible humor offset any sadness. Her 2015 book was the novel she had always wanted to pen, Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say, which examined the marriage of the parents of the heroine of Pride and Prejudice.
Critics hailed Juska’s books as taboo-busters and readers―at least those in her liberal Berkeley zip code (not so much her childhood Mennonite neighbors) ―reveled in senior sexual liberation. The ladies in her gym took the radical in their midst in stride; in the San Francisco Bay area, the only unforgivable sin is to be on the wrong side of the political spectrum. Jane addressed this issue: “If they found out that I was Republican, say, I would be shunned immediately.” From a stylistic perspective, Jane proved herself as polished a writer as she was a speaker. In the wrong hands, her years of living dangerously could have degenerated into the trashiest of California New Age jargon or a sordid sexual manual for the over-sixty crowd. As a resident of California, an interviewer asked her the inevitable question: If her book became a film, who would she cast in the starring roles? When he suggested Judi Dench as Ms. Juska, Jane shook her head. She said she would play herself and that Daniel Day-Lewis would play her men―all of them. The final question was if there would be further ads, or if she was finally putting the brakes on her correspondence. Jane’s reply: “Who knows? Maybe in ten years. Well, let me see. That would get me to eighty. Well, why not?”
But, between the lines, dealing with lust crept in a note of Bonjour Tristesse. Her lonesome kvetching―even in the guise of humor―left singletons, regardless of age, a trifle blue. Ms. Juska concluded that life is random, romance and sex are fleeting, and older women will always be marginalized. Jane’s erotic journey may have started with Trollope, but it ended with Hardy. Juska wrote that, in retrospect, she finally understood the last line of The Mayor of Casterbridge, “Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” However, her late-in-life sexploits were not in vain. In a nod to Virginia Woolf (a literary reference Ms. Juska would have appreciated), with the windfall from her books she was, at long last, able to afford a room of her own.