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'Before I turn 67...'

After decades of celibacy, Jane Juska embarked on a sexual adventure that would make most women her age blush. It started with a boldly written ad in a magazine, writes JOHANNA SCHNELLER

By JOHANNA SCHNELLER
Saturday, May 31, 2003 - Page F9

Jane Juska is 70, silver-haired, short, not skinny. She's a retired high-school English teacher, a therapy veteran, a divorcee and mother of a grown son. And she loves sex. That combination has made her memoir, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, published this month, an instant, happy scandal. ("Round-heeled" is a quaint label for a woman who is readily toppled onto her back.) If her book were a bed, it would be a well-used one, sheets in a tangle.

At the age of 66, after nearly 30 years of celibacy -- 30 years! -- Ms. Juska placed this ad in the tony New York Review of Books: "Before I turn 67 -- next March -- I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." Sixty-three men responded. Over a year, Ms. Juska communicated with eight, had sex with five (the oldest, Jonah, is in his 80s; the youngest, Graham, his 30s) and chronicled the results.

"Somebody said to me, 'There are two taboos, and you've broken both now,' " Ms. Juska says by phone from her home in Berkeley, Calif. "There's the older woman/younger man taboo, which never seems to go away. And the other is, a woman my age having sex, period. I didn't know that was a taboo."

Nor did Ms. Juska know that her adventures were just beginning. At every stop on her busy publicity tour, men have offered to become her lovers: They crowd around for her autograph, write to her agent, send "mash faxes" to the bookstores where she reads. "Not hundreds of them," she says, chuckling. "But enough. I had no idea this was going to happen." She pauses. "But if I had known, I would have done it anyway."

That kind of forthrightness, along with Ms. Juska's humour and generosity, have made her book a bestseller, and her the darling of chat shows. It gained her "three and a half" ongoing boyfriends from the book. (One is Graham, the thirtysomething, from New York; the half is Matt from Wisconsin, who refuses to meet her, but with whom she has "parties over the telephone.")

It has also got her a lot of e-mail from perverts, jerks and judgmental souls, and lost her two friends. No storybook sweetheart, Ms. Juska admits to having spent earlier years swilling booze and pills, ballooning up to 234 pounds (she has since lost 100 of them), having issues with her father and a crush on her psychoanalyst. And she's no shrinking violet: Eyeing one lover, she thinks, "Uh-oh, my cervix is in for it now," with equal parts rue and glee.

But as she herself writes, "In reaching out for a full life, I knew that I could not choose, would not get, only the good parts. A full life was just that, pleasure and pain, joy and despair."

In honour of her eight conquests, I asked Ms. Juska eight questions. She answered them with gusto.

Why are people so stunned that a 67-year-old woman wants to have sex? "Sex is part of evolution, is it not? There is a sorting out, females and males, in order to create a strong next generation. When a woman is no longer procreative, she is cast aside, put on the ice floe. Men go on to sperm away. So I suppose we could say [the shock] is evolutionary."

Does sex at 67 feel the same as at 27? "It depends on whom you're having it with. If I'm having sex with a man whom I adore and who adores me, I could be 27, I could be 17, I could be any age we want to be, and so could he. But I didn't have a very happy early time with sex. This period of my sexual life is wonderful."

You write as explicitly about talking to men as you do about sleeping with them. Which is better, sex or conversation? "The conversations, one-on-one discussions with a man who was respectful of and interested in my ideas -- they were empowering. The sex part was fulfilling. For me, sex had been a huge hole in my life, that kept getting huger. Writing about sex is hard, though. Philip Roth is the only one I know who can do it.

"But the conversations were such a delight, and in some ways a surprise. I don't think I would have created a relationship with any of these men, had it not been for their conversation. God, one of them talks forever. I thought men were supposed to roll over and go to sleep."

What else did you learn about men? "They all feel fine about their bodies. Maybe it's the locker room or something. Every one of those men -- except the one who has a hernia -- has no problem walking around undressed. They look so much better than I. Men's legs, my God, it's unfair.

"I also learned that yearning is not restricted to women. The men I met, there was a yearning in all of them. Doing this publicity, I have glimpsed a great longing out there, in everyone. Maybe it is more intense among older people, because we don't have that long to fill whatever void we think we want to fill.

Maybe I'll write a book on living with loneliness, because I'd like to say a few words in its defence. There's no shame to being lonely. Why do people pity you? Loneliness is a feeling. Often, you get it when you're not alone. I've never been as lonely as when I was married, and I bet you a lot of people feel that way.

"But through all this, I learned more about myself. I learned I don't have to cower or give way. I was ready to be a person. I came at it with freedom, because of the psychoanalysis, and because I'd determined the only person who might get hurt would be me. I had never been free my whole life, so there I was: Pleasure is not a bad thing? Really? Let's go have some! I had finally lived long enough, I had moved away from my beginnings."

Did you ever become more comfortable with your body? "No, I still don't trot around naked. I'm the fastest undresser-and-under-the-covers in the west. I don't know who makes up who's beautiful. Beer companies, I guess. Ad agencies. My body has never looked the way I thought it should, ever. Ever since I began to grow these breasts far too early in age. Then I put on all that weight. Then I lost 100 pounds in a year, which meant I had a lot of leftover skin. Still do.

"But there are many beautiful women who don't think they are. . . . I asked one of my men friends, 'Do you think men are more forgiving of physical flaws?' He said, 'No, I'm a lookist. But it may be that we men just see different things.' Good answer. Whatever comfort I've come to have regarding my own body has come from men who enjoy it."

How have women reacted to the book? "All over the map. Some say to me, Eww! One woman e-mailed me, 'What would Graham want with you?' At a reading in Berkeley, some woman asked, 'How could you go to bed with strangers?' It was funny, other women shouted her down. One of the surprises of all this is how terrific young women think the book is.

"On the TV stuff I've done, the producers and assistants are generally young women. So when I go into the green room and makeup, nobody pays any attention to me. But after I tell my story, those young women want to shake my hand, thumbs up, 'You go, girl!' I love it. And my niece [who is disapproving in the book] and I have reconciled. She read the book and called me last week. She said, 'I was a bitch, wasn't I?' "

Will there be a sequel? "When I was writing it, I thought, 'I could keep going,' because things continued to happen. But I wanted it to be a happy ending, and that was. Hey, it's my book, I can end it where I choose. I didn't intend a sequel.

"I said, Enough is enough. But since this thing has come out, it has taken on a life of its own. So I've begun jotting things down that are just too good to forget. So maybe there will.

"I am almost finished with a second book. It's about 40 years of teaching, how the larger world was reflected in my classroom, how the students and I bent and changed the rules."

What's the best pickup line you've gotten lately? "One man said, 'I write erotic novels with older women as protagonists. Would you like to read some?' Not tonight, sweetie.

"One man wrote, 'Your book has stirred my heart and my groin, both of which I feared would lie fallow for the rest of my life.' And unless I get to my e-mail in about five minutes, some guy from Arizona is on his way."