Charla Muller

I thought this book would be an interesting book about relationships and the strains that the modern world puts them under. Instead I found myself getting annoyed at the writer especially her apparent inability to use the word 'sex'. If she found it so repellent why did she not use the phrase 'making love'. Her use of the word 'imtimacy'made me think of silly 'tweenagers' giggling behind their hands at anything related to sex.This woman is over 40 for gods sake!
It seemed to me to be the author shouting "oh how wonderful am I " and "aren't I so good to my husband by doing this". But what is so good about the sex when it seemed to me that the majority of the time it was a case of 'oh lets get it over with for tonight'. Quality not quantity should count more in my opinion. Perhps we will one day get a book from her husband entitled 'Good sex does not necessarily mean lots of it'. Ha Ha… (más)

I picked this up and started glancing through it and soon I was sucked in. Not because it was so good, but because it was so strange. The idea sounded intriguing enough, what WOULD happen if a couple had sex every day for a year? Your not going to get the answer you want to that question.

This is mostly the thoughts of a middle class, white, conservative, Christian, American woman living in the suburbs. She's fairly shallow, very self centered and self absorbed, and somewhat immature. She seems to think everyone in the world feels exactly like she and a few of her friends do. Which is not to say that she's entirely unpleasant. She can be fairly funny and charming, despite the fact that she tells us explicitly that she is both of those things at least a dozen or two times. The book was written with a co-writer, and it seems to me there's a strange contradictory feel to it, like all the parts don't quite mesh. There's a lot of statements of how she doesn't like sex, and an equal number saying how much it has enriched her life.

There's no sex in this book. I don't mean that there's not any graphic descriptions, I mean it's not often even mentioned, and when it is 90% of the time she uses the word "intimacy" instead. Intimacy is not a synonym for sex. And this is not a couple deciding to embark on this experiment, this is her giving her husband a "gift" of sex for a year. "The gift" is how she refers to sex the other 10% of the time. But it becomes apparent later on that she feels "the gift" is such a huge sacrifice on her part (and she tells us MANY times how great of a person she is for doing it, and congratulates herself a lot for "getting through it") that she doesn't really need to be pleasant about it.

Oblivious is a word that comes to mind. She seems to insult and belittle her husband throughout the book and not notice, or think she comes off as funny and charming doing it. At one point he basically tells her to shut up and stop talking about the bills and errands during sex. She simply says she is trying to multi-task, like any modern mom, might as well try to get something useful done while their at it, and you can't blame a girl for trying. No, I'm not kidding, that's what she says. In another cringe worthy episode her husband says it would be better if she didn't just lie there and grimace. She explains that her sacrifice is more than enough already, and he should just close his eyes if he doesn't like it, she can't be bothered to do more. These are episodes she relates to the world. I'm not sure how she thought that would appear to other people.

I have to say that the previous paragraphs make the book sound much worse than it is, even though it's all accurate. The book is not without merit, but part of the appeal for me was a glance into the mind of someone so foreign.

If she has another book I predict it will be about her divorce, and how she never saw it coming.… (más)