Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity (Paperback)

by Anna Broadway (Author)
Key Phrases: guy friend, musical man, pseudo dates, Poster Boy, Married Man, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Broadway wants what many young Christian women want: a fulfilling partnership with a husband who shares her faith—and with whom she shares a certain zingy chemistry. But the young urban editor has found that real romance is a whole lot more complicated and painful than the courtships in the Harlequin novels she devoured as a teen. In this spicy and funny Gen-X memoir, Broadway details her own rocky romances, giving code names to her many crushes and paramours, including Poster Boy, Aryan Atheist, the Captain, Ad Weasel and Singapore Fling, among others. Youngish evangelical readers will recognize many of their own heartaches in these pages: the struggle to remain chaste when marriage seems distant; the pain of outgrowing a close-knit college Christian fellowship group; the plunge into the isolations of postcollegiate life and work. Although there have been a number of memoirs chronicling young adulthood and the quarterlife crisis, Broadway's account adds a candid faith journey to the usual fare. At times, the bloglike chapterlets mire down in excessive details and characters that don't wind up being important to her story. However, her engaging voice and wit will appeal to a wide readership. (Apr. 15)
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Product Description
Anna Broadway’s “Sexless in the City” blog has become a popular Internet destination, attracting readers with its amusing tales of romantic misadventures and candid, far-from-prissy reports on the difficulties of trying to reconcile Christian beliefs with the mores and temptations of the modern world.

In SEXLESS IN THE CITY, Broadway offers a lighthearted, yet unflinching, look at the realities of life as a twentysomething urbanite. She writes about her youthful ambition of writing or editing bodice-rippers, struggles with debt and loneliness, the pleasures and perils of meeting men in singles bars, and other urban outposts, and about her friendships with women searching, as she is, for a good man to spend the rest of their lives with. Guided by her trust in God and the teachings of the Bible, Broadway navigates romantic entanglements with the Harvard Lickwit, Hippie the Groper, Ad Weasel, 5 Percent Man, and various others who wander in and out her life—but never into her bed.

As Broadway discovered, romance novels don’t quite prepare you for love in the real world. For Christian women looking for guidance through the land of contemporary romance, SEXLESS IN THE CITY is the ideal place to start.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Galilee Trade (April 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385518390
• ISBN-13: 978-0385518390
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #795,489 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A saga of searching the wrong way for the right kind of love, May 4, 2008

By	Eric J. Anderson (Ankeny, Iowa) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is a "memoir of reluctant chastity." More than that it is a spiritual journey. It is about a woman trying to find God's purpose in her life and develop a working relationship and peace with Him. One of her major obstacles was life's refusal to conform to the romantic script she had written in her fantasies -- find a suitable Christian knight in shining armor as her soulmate in college, get married, have a brood of kids. As the old Yiddish proverb goes, "We plan, God laughs."

When the perfect man doesn't materialize on schedule, Anna Broadway tries various methods of searching out and piquing interest from the opposite sex, some of them merely ineffective, some disastrous, some embarrassing.

The book is probably easiest to read in the beginning, as she reveals her upbringing and personality, her early romantic experiences or lack of same, her obsession with love and romance and sexuality, her conflict between what she expects from God and what He actually delivers.

I found the middle part of the book a little confusing, with too many characters (identified by aliases the author has given them) drawn with sketchy details. It is long on descriptions of feelings and impressions of events that occur -- as it were -- off the stage, and it is short on full conversations and exposition of scenes that would put a reader in the middle of the action. Another reviewer of Sexless in the City wrote that the author should "show, not tell." This is probably the biggest barrier to getting the point across to the reader. This reticence to fully reveal such scenes might have been done to lessen exposure of other people in her narrative. (?) Perhaps a novel format would have better enabled the author to tell her story, with enough fudging of details to maintain plausibly that "any similarity to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental." As a memoir-writer, Anna is hyper-analytical, and we do get a great amount of analysis, but less of the actual people and happenings being analyzed than I would have liked.

The book ends neatly with an epiphany of sorts, brought on not by rejection or romantic fulfillment, but by acknowledging irreconcilable differences between her and one of her most hopeful prospects. How she deals with that letdown is a lesson for Christians in letting go of something less (though deeply desired) to gain something more -- a closer covenant relationship with God. The answer turns out to be faith and trust in God to supply our needs and be our focus, not another human being.

Although this book fatigued me at times, I found it valuable as a story of someone very serious about Christianity, who after many errors (which is how most of us learn -- many, many errors), comes to understand and turn away from things that are in essence idols, or at least weights and distractions. It might be particularly meaningful for young women who are obsessed, as the author was, with the ideal of courtship, marriage, and happily ever after with a real soulmate. I appreciated the author's deep honest thoughts about her conflict with God and how she came to perceive His purposes, while not always agreeing with her interpretation of God's action or inaction. It gave me added incentive for self-examination.

The book may also be an education for men trying to understand at least some of the inexplicable behavior of the women in their lives. How a small thing a man says and does, or doesn't say and doesn't do, can lead to five different and inconsistent interpretations in a woman's mind. In an old Star Trek episode, a space probe scans and describes a human female as "a mass of conflicting impulses." Women are from Venus, but reading Anna Broadway might help the Martians learn a little of the landscape of that alien shore. We can't really understand, but we might become more understanding.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sexless in the City, July 24, 2008

By	Danielle Galante - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After having read many Christian books on sexuality that rely solely on the "true love waits" mantra, I found this book to be very refreshing. Broadway uses her experiences to show the fallacy behind the American myth that true love and marriage will solve every problem in life. She dispels this myth and shows that only the love from God can ever truly satisfy our huge need for love. She also does not shy away from discussing her own desires and I truly appreciated that.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Been there!, May 5, 2008

By	Frances Rooney "RealReader" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I couldn't wait to read this book once I heard about it. "Anna" has tackled a subject that every single woman of faith has grappled with at one point or another, and she's done it with a measure of wit and self-deprecation that is refreshing. We really don't need any more dogma, or "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts." The sexual roles in our society are so mixed up anyway - add an overlay of faith to the mix and it gets really crazy.

I appreciated that this is a memoir about being true to who you are, bad choices and all. Anna writes with a clear eye on the culture and on the faith community - and boy, are they confused about each other when it comes to sex and relationships!

I look forward to reading more from this author.