Customer Reviews

Apples and Oranges : My Journey To Sexual Identity

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jan Clausen has been walking on the wild side of sexual preference all her life. First she came out as a lesbian, in a world that is not particularly friendly to the sexually deviant. Then she left her 12-year partnership to be with a man, a decision which alienated her from the lesbian community she had been so instrumental in building. In this book, she tries to make sense of it all, for herself and for the reader, exploring what it means to be a lesbian or not.

The central idea of the book is that either/or sexuality is too confining, that women's eroticism flows in a way that makes all labels into prisons. This summing-up misses a great deal, however, as she covers the ground of her own intense life experience, the ways in which the lesian community deals with sexual outlaws, and the ways in which our principles sometimes get in the way of living authentic lives.

This is a great book, just because of the ideas discussed. However, the author is also a poet, and so the prose is dense and lovely, with a rhythm that supports the philosophical discussion in a profound way.

Jan Clausen wrote a very intellectual and profound moving book especially for this very book, Apples & Oranges. I am very moved by the depth of feelings in which Jan Clausen described herself and her experiences. The character development is a real suspense and this book gave me thrill and also could have helped people who are in search of their sexuality. Moreover, I really could not get my hands of the book, and if I could, I would read it from dawn till dusk. A real life experience full of colours of life which brought an aspect in my real life. Very Good !

Jan Clausen's memoir of her sexual and personal journey is both affecting and thought-provoking. She writes extremely well, and with no-holds-barred honesty. What fascinated me the most is her exploration of what might be called socially constructed sexual identities. In some critical ways, it matters little who is doing the constructing. Whether queer, straight, or bi (or none of the above), conventional communities all seem to want to define people according to unchangeable, constricting labels. Those who fit that community's expectations are accepted, but woe betide the person who chooses her own path. Human sexual identity may simply be much more potentially fluid than communities with rigid standards (however radical they may think they are) are willing to accept. And in the process of expelling those who have disappointed them, those communities, whether straight, lesbian, or Amish Christian, show clearly that ideology matters more to them than friendship or even love. That was one of the lessons I learned from this book: those who love us only when we behave as they wish love their belief system best of all. And those who truly love us, will do so unconditionally.

I can't help but posit that Jan Clausen's memoir was written for a very specific audience (well-educated lesbians who are contemporaries of hers) of which I am decidedly not a part.
The text is very dense and much more erudite and philosophical than I was prepared to expect in her memoir. Clausen ruminates on what it means to be a woman in many different contexts: as relates to her middle-class 1950's upbringing, at a "hippie" college in the Pacific Northwest, in the lesbian intelligentsia enclave where she spent more than a decade, as a "hasbian" who is now with an Oxford-educated West Indian man. Apparently she kept very detailed journals which she quotes frequently, as well as quoting somewhat esoteric scholarly texts. The language used is a very definite parlance that those outside the queer community might find difficult to penetrate and even understand at all at times.
I found the anecdotes of Clausen's life much, much more interesting than her endless exploration of what all of it Means, and how all of it relates to Gender and Identity. It's almost as if Clausen needs to hide behind the scholarly investigation and analysis of her life in order to relate it to a reader. It's not entirely necessary.