Customer Reviews

Campus Sexpot: A Memoir (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction)

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2 star:		(1)
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It's laugh out loud funny, brilliantly written, universally wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, about a third of the way into it, I felt compelled to write to Mr. Carkeet and compliment him! The deconstruction of the novel w/in the memoir is so right on. I can hardly wait to finish it, so I can start it all over again!

This may just be my favorite David Carkeet book. Yes, it's funny and smart and wonderfully written, but I've rarely had such a good time reading a memoir. The pages flew by. The commentary on Dale Koby's novel is hilarious but also very discerning (there are astute lessons here for struggling writers). And when the memoir turns its attention toward Carkeet's father the book achieves real weight and substance. Highly recommended!

I first became familiar with David Carkeet's work through a humorous essay called "The Unplanned Freefall." I consider "The Unplanned Freefall" to be the funniest piece of writing I have ever had the pleasure to read. I thoroughly enjoyed "Campus Sexpot" and have read it twice. In some ways, it's an unsettling book because of its frankness about sex and growing up. It has wonderful descriptions of small-town characters and occasional critiques of the writing style of an English teacher turned pornographer. Carkeet closes with a heartfelt chapter on alcoholism and his relationship with his father. I highly recommend this book.

Remember Portnoy's complaint? This one is better. A memoir of the author's early years in high school as a short, fair, studious sex-obessed innocent.

Structured as a re-reading of a real, but obscure, mildly pornographic paperback, the author ranges widely over the youth culture of a small central California gold rush town in the 1960's.

The humor and the hysterical situations are timeless.

While lol funny, the book is also a revealing and sensitive biography of the author's family, both upstanding, and tragic.

This book is way too short. I finished it wanting more stories. It's kind of like an anti "Wayne's World".

David Carkeet is smart and funny. His memoir of teenage sexual angst is cleverly woven around his reading of a book (which might possibly be a creation of his own imagination) called Campus Sexpot. I laughed out loud as I read-- but my sister didn't crack a smile.

Read it. You'll thank me later.

Inspired by the author's sleepy California Gold Rush town of Sonora, CAMPUS SEXPOT is a blend of memoir and novel, and it's hard to easily place it: just file it under 'hilarious' and 'fun', as it provides a rollicking look at Carkeet's roots by taking a sleazy look at his 'nowhere' home town: an innocent small town by day turned to den of passion by night. Romance, coming of age, and small town middle class sexual secrets blend in a novel which is spicy, fun, and more than a touch controversial.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor

California Bookwatch

This little book starts off hilarious, the weaving of a pulp fiction novel with Carkeet's memoir. Carkeet's breakdown of the prose of the pulp novel rivals humorist James Lileks' quips, as he critiques the writing style and the genre in general and weaves it in to the narrative of his own coming-of-age saga.

The book starts to lose steam, however, towards the end. The pulp fiction novel is all but forgotten, and Carkeet begins to ramble and jump from one point to another about his later childhood years and his adulthood. There's nothing wrong with his reminisces, and some are poignant and amusing, but the way he abandons the format he starts the book with gives the overall work an uneven feel -- as if he can't quite finish what he starts. Also, the points he chooses to elaborate on seem random, at best, and some of the major themes begun in the first half of the book are abandoned in the second (did he ever grow? did he ever "make it" with a girl? how did the rest of his high school go for him?). It's a shame, too, because the idea was a brilliant one as far as memoirs go.