Swooning Beauty: A Memoir Of Pleasure [Paperback]

Joanna Frueh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0874176727 | ISBN-13: 978-0874176728

When her parents died and her marriage disintegrated within the span of a few months, art historian and performance artist Joanna Frueh entered a painful period of grief and mourning. This book is about how she healed herself and in the process explored the vast range of her potential as a woman, for mind inseparable from the body, for being truly alive.

Swooning Beauty is an ornate, intimate memoir of discovery and healing. Frueh’s path to recovery lay through a profound examination of her intuitions, desires, fantasies, dreams, and emotions, her capacity for pleasure—visual, sensual, intellectual, gastronomic, and erotic; and her sense of her own heroic female identity. Hers is the passionate voice of a creative, intelligent woman scrutinizing the nature of love in all its forms—including self-love—and the ways of being that make us free, flexible, more fully real and more fully human. The result is an engaging view into the rich and colorful inner life of a woman at the threshold of middle age, of the blossoming of mind and spirit that comes after suffering and self-realization. Pleasure, she concludes, "is the absence of lack. Self-love is a necessary plenitude. Vigilance in love brings us freedom. Freedom is not an absolute whose attainment is humanly impossible. Yogis say that the self that is not ego is free. That self is the spacious heart, the spacious mind." Frueh offers us wisdom and comfort for the journey into middle age, and the deep pleasure of encountering a generous, lively spirit and a remarkably spacious mind.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A performance artist and art history professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, Frueh has a lot to say about her own sexuality. She shares with readers her girlhood masturbation pleasures, her memory of seeing her parents having sex and her parents' celebration of her first period. She describes her various experiences of arousal and orgasm, as well as her intense identification with Mel Gibson in Braveheart. She discusses favorite outfits, perfumes and makeup. Now and then she mentions her love of chocolate and sensuous flowers, and her theories about why people admire her "luminous sexuality" and find her so "seductive" and "glamorous." Yet it may be hard for some readers to find Frueh as fascinating as she finds herself. For Frueh's wing of the avant-garde, it's liberating to be into beauty, especially "high femininity" styling. Thus she dismisses Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues as insufficiently outrageous or revolutionary, only to go on for pages about the wonderfulness of the color pink, or how hot she thinks she looks in her Betsey Johnson dress with her cute little ankle boots. Frueh's book will be too narcissistic for most readers, though those who enjoy deep discussions of vaginas and vulvas will certainly be pleased. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Pain and grief, and pain caused by grief, offer many lessons if we're able to learn from them. Art history professor and performance artist Frueh, whose work possesses, according to critics, a "luminous sexuality," suffered multiple losses within months when both parents died and her husband left her. Her memoir of redemptive healing mixes chronological narrative with flashbacks, fantasy, and free-flowing associations in a densely written, complexly textured, and sensual account. She writes of her imaginary male self, "Mel," based on actor Mel Gibson, a male symbol for her strength and bravery even though she is happy in her female body. As she scrutinizes her inner feelings, passions, and intuitions, Frueh nourishes her senses and is finally able to celebrate the mourning process, which inspires her to build a parallel to her lifetime love of chocolate with all of its sensuous pleasure. To swoon, according to Webster's, means to lose consciousness or enter a state of rapture. The author does both in this demanding work. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874176727
• ISBN-13: 978-0874176728
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,715,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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