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  Praise for The Sexual Life of Catherine M.:

  “[An] exquisite, philosophical, imaginative, precisely reported memoir…The Sexual Life of Catherine M. offers a wholly unique voice: brilliantly literate, utterly unabashed, exactingly concrete, consistently provocative. The excellence of Millet’s memoir rests not in numbers…but in Proustian memories and perceptions suffused with sex and insight.”

  —Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Remarkable…The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is refreshingly unapologetic in its enthusiasm for the sexual wilderness…. She answers for her particular enthusiasms with a grace and a curiosity that are far more winning than the common American gambit of presenting one’s pathology and the struggle with it as way stations on the road to salvation.”

  —Will Blythe, Elle

  “[A] maverick…an epicure…[Her] aloof, gracefully crystalline style is as elegant as any French pornography since Sade…. Beyond the book’s stylistic brilliance, one of the reasons it appeals is that unlike earlier female pornographers—Erica Jong comes to mind—Millet never proselytizes.”

  —Francine du Plessix Gray, Vogue

  “Her sex life—ranging from her first group coupling just weeks after losing her virginity to her recent romps with her steady lover—is treated frankly enough to keep you engrossed (even after the umpteenth orgy) and with sufficient cerebral heft to remind you that the book you can’t put down is more than dirty.”

  —Mark Healy, GQ

  “It is truly a masterpiece of sexual exploration and I’ve no doubt that the book will be a classic of sexual literature.”

  —Alistair Highet, The Hartford Courant

  “An intelligent reflection, crude, unusually frank.”

  —Mario Vargas Llosa, Los Angeles Times

  “[The Sexual Life of Catherine M. contains] no invention, no elusiveness, no embroidery. The truth…of her full, orgiastic, freely offered, frenzied, consuming, liberated, spontaneous sexual life…Astonishing.”

  —Penelope Rault, Jalouse (France)

  “Millet’s book strikes me not only as provocative, but dangerous…. Her entire sexual stance…is an impudent and fundamentally inarguable challenge to the assumptions about female sexuality on which most of the world’s social arrangements are built.”

  —Vince Passaro, New York Observer

  “[Millet’s] prose is lovely and surprising…. The Sexual Life of Catherine M. gives us a titillating glimpse of Millet’s alternative universe, where everyday objects reveal themselves to be sex toys and offices become pleasure domes.”

  —Joy Press, The Village Voice

  “If you want a book that’s guaranteed to be picked up by every member at your summer house (unless your Hamptons harem happens to be guarded by eunuchs), this is the one.”

  —New York Magazine

  “[A] stylistic tour de force recounting three decades of sexual exploits…This book’s pleasures are first and foremost literary…. It is a rare treat to listen to a measured intelligence delve into the folds of its own salacious sexual history with such frankness and with such little interest in scandal…. A Proustian whole far greater than the sum of its parts…Relax, sit back, and enjoy.”

  —Saul Anton, Bookforum

  “[The Sexual Life of Catherine M.] evoked from most critics the sort of feigned boredom people offer up when they are intensely disturbed by sexual honesty. The joke was on them.”

  —Charles Taylor, Newsday

  “Writing a subversive book today seems impossible. Yet that is just what Millet does…. After Sade, you could have said that no one could do it better. Millet surprises exactly for this reason…. An elegy to the body, to human fraternity, an excellent book.”

  —La Razón (Spain)

  “A mind-blowing relief. She guiltlessly philosophizes about getting laid and giving head in the best French tradition…. To be brilliant and to be brilliant at giving head—Sexual Life is a fantasy well worth importing.”

  —Fantomina Haywood, Bust

  “The graceful, thoughtful, oddly charming, and profoundly pornographic account of a French intellectual’s life of extreme sexuality…[This] memoir will surely be the most blatantly pornographic read many will encounter this year…. A bold, intelligent, pioneering tour de force.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “A smoldering slim volume that will color your cheeks quicker than the midday sun…. In the book, [Millet] unabashedly chronicles three decades of her own unbridled sexual exploration.”

  —Michael Rovner, New York Post

  “A wild quest for sex for sex’s sake…A woman of deliberate purpose, Catherine Millet…relates her sexual life without trembling, and allows us to share her pleasures…. A book of a miraculous grace.”

  —Daniel Bougnoux, Le Monde (France)

  “Porn for the intelligentsia?…There’s a shortage of literature that can be compared to The Sexual Life of Catherine M., which is intelligently brimming with graphic descriptions of swanky club orgies, assembly-line penetrations, and ‘impromptu fucks in the countryside’ while remaining lustily unconcerned about anything outside the supposedly infinite possibilities of random sex.”

  —Norene Cashen, San Antonio Current

  “Excellent.”

  —Jane

  “Brave…Her book makes The Story of O feel as winsome as Annie Hall.”

  —John Powers, LA Weekly

  “From Cyrano de Bergerac to Marquis de Sade, from Choderlos de Laclos to Casanova, they would, breathless with admiration, have laid at the feet of Catherine Millet.”

  —NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands)

  “Her truthfulness and simplicity are captivating. She provides an intelligent contemplation of sex that is free of Bataille’s nastiness [and] de Sade’s discomfort.”

  —Lisa Lambert, Willamette Week

  “[An] explicit journal of unending sexual availability…Ms. Millet’s book revels in its own sexual laissez-faire; like Tracey Emin’s bed, it turns self-revelation into artistic statement.”

  —Michael Fishwick, The Economist

  “Delightfully unabashed…Readers of all persuasions about sex will derive something of value from Millet’s honest, deeply personal exploration of her desires.”—Bonnie Johnston, Booklist

  “In the tradition of Jean Genet and Violette Leduc, whose descriptions of their sexual encounters were not meant to titillate so much as to explore the meaning of the erotic.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A sex book in the tradition of The Story of O. and de Sade—just as classic and graphic…but more personal…The sex scenes Millet sets and performs are many, but they’re imbedded within far more intimate disclosures about identity, the process of self-awareness, and varying degrees of intimacy.”

  —Alex Richmond, Philadelphia City Paper

  THE SEXUAL

  LIFE OF

  CATHERINE M.

  THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERINE M.

  Catherine Millet

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

  BY ADRIANA HUNTER

  Grove Press / New york

  Copyright © 2001 by Éditions du Seuil

  Translation copyright © 2002 by Adriana Hunter

  Afterword copyright © 2002 by Editions du Seuil

  Afterword translation copyright © 2003 by Adriana Hunter

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publis
hers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally published in French as

  La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M. by Éditions du Seuil, Paris.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Millet, Catherine.

  [Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. English]

  The sexual life of Catherine M. / Catherine Millet ; translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-55584-701-2

  1. Erotic literature. 2. Women—Sexual behavior. 3. Sex.

  4. Group Sex. I. Title.

  HQ463 .M4413 2002

  306.7'082—dc21 2002020032

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Contents

  1. Numbers

  2. Space

  3. Confined Space

  4. Details

  Afterword: Why and How

  THE SEXUAL

  LIFE OF

  CATHERINE M.

  1.Numbers

  As a child I thought about numbers a great deal. The memories we have of solitary thoughts and actions from the first few years of life are very clear-cut: they provide the first opportunities for self-awareness, whereas events shared with other people can never be isolated from the feelings (of admiration, fear, love or loathing) that those others inspire in us, feelings that, as children, we are far less able to identify or even understand. I, therefore, have particularly vivid memories of the thoughts that steered me into scrupulous counting exercises every evening before I went to sleep. Shortly after my brother was born (when I was three and a half ), my family moved into a new apartment. For the first few years we lived there, my bed was in the largest room, facing the door. I would lie staring at the light that came across the corridor from the kitchen where my mother and grandmother were still busying themselves, and I could never get to sleep until I had visualized these numerical problems one after the other. One of the problems related to the question of having several husbands. Not the possibility of the situation, which seems to have been accepted, but the circumstances themselves. Could a woman have several husbands at the same time, or only one after the other? In the latter case, how long did she have to stay married to each one before she could move on? What would be an “acceptable” number of husbands: a few, say five or six, or many more than that—countless husbands? How would I go about it when I grew up?

  As the years went by, I substituted counting children for husbands. I imagine that, in finding myself under the seductive spell of some identified man (in turn, a film star, a cousin, etc.) and focusing my wandering thoughts on his features, I perhaps felt less uncertainty about the future. I could envisage in more concrete terms my life as a young married woman, and therefore the presence of children. More or less the same questions were raised again: was six the most “acceptable” number, or could you have more? What sort of age gap should there be between them? And then there was the ratio of girls to boys.

  I cannot think back to these ideas without connecting them to other obsessions that preoccupied me at the same time. I had established a relationship with God that meant I had to think every evening about what he was going to eat, so the enumeration of the various dishes and glasses of water I offered him mentally—fussing over the size of the helpings, the rate at which they were served, etc.—alternated with the interrogations into the extent to which my future life would be filled with husbands and children. I was very religious, and it could well be that my confused perception of the identities of God and his son favored my inclination to counting. God was the thundering voice that brought men back into line without revealing him to them. But I had been taught that he was simultaneously the naked pink baby made of plaster that I put into the Christmas manger every year, the suffering man nailed to the crucifix before which we prayed—even though both of these were actually his son—as well as a sort of ghost called the Holy Spirit. Of course, I knew perfectly well that Joseph was Mary’s husband, and that Jesus, even though he was both God and the son of God, called him “Father.” The Virgin was in fact the mother of the Christ child, but there were times when she was referred to as his daughter.

  When I was old enough to go to Sunday school, I asked to speak to the priest one day. The problem I laid before him was this: I wanted to become a nun, to be a “bride of Christ,” and to become a missionary in an Africa seething with destitute peoples, but I also wanted to have husbands and children. The priest was a laconic man, and he cut short the conversation, believing that my concerns were premature.

  Until the idea of this book came to me, I had never really thought about my sexuality very much. I did, however, realize that I had had multiple partners early on, which is unusual, especially for girls, or it certainly was among the milieu in which I was brought up. I lost my virginity when I was eighteen—which is not especially early—but I also had group sex a few weeks after my deflowering. On that occasion I was not the initiator, but I was the one who precipitated it—something I still cannot explain to myself. I have always thought that I just happened to meet men who liked to make love in groups or liked to watch their partners making love with other men, and the only reaction I had (being naturally open to new experiences and seeing no moral obstacle) was to adapt willingly to their ways. But I have never drawn any theory from this, and therefore have never been militant about it.

  There were five of us, three boys and two girls, and we were finishing our lunch in a garden on a hill above Lyon. I had come to see a young man I’d met recently while staying in London, and I had taken advantage of the fact that a friend’s boyfriend, André (from Lyon himself ), was driving down from Paris. When I asked if we could stop on the way for me to pee quickly, André came and watched and stroked me as I squatted. It was not an unpleasant situation, but it did make me feel slightly ashamed, and it was perhaps at that precise moment that I learned to sidestep my embarrassment by burying my head between his legs and taking his cock in my mouth. When we reached Lyon, I stayed with André and we went to stay with a friend of his, a boy called Ringo who lived with an older woman whose house it was. The latter was away, and the boys had made the most of this and organized a little party. Another boy came and brought a girl, a tall, lanky, tomboyish girl with very short, coarse hair.

  It was in June or July, it was hot and somebody suggested that we should all take our clothes off and jump into the big pond. I heard André’s voice saying his girlfriend wouldn’t be long joining in, and his words sounded a little muffled because I already had my T-shirt over my head. I forget when and why I stopped wearing underwear (even though as soon as I was thirteen or fourteen, my mother had made me wear an underwire bra and a panty girdle on the pretext that a woman “should be held in place”). In any event, I was naked almost immediately. The other girl started getting undressed, too, but in the end no one went in the water. The garden was exposed, and that is probably why the next set of images that come back to me are in a bedroom, me nestled in a tall cast-iron bed; all I can see through the metal bars are the brightly lit walls; I am aware of the other girl lying on a divan in one corner of the room. André fucked me first, quite slowly and calmly, which was his way. Then he stopped abruptly. I was overcome with an ineffable feeling of anxiety, just long enough to see him moving away, walking unhurriedly, his back arched, toward the other girl. Ringo came and took his place on top of me, while the third boy, who was more reserved than the other two, rested on one elbow beside us and ran his hand over my upper body. Ringo’s body was very different from André’s, and I liked it better. He was taller, more wiry, and one of those men who isolate the action of the pelvis from the rest of the body, who thrust without smothering, supporting their torso with their arms. But André seemed more mature to me (he was in fact older and had fought in the war in Algeria), his flesh was not so spare, he already had less hair,
and I liked going to sleep cuddled up next to him with my buttocks against his belly, telling him we were a perfect fit. Ringo withdrew, and the one who had been watching and stroking me took his turn even though I had been resisting a terrible urge to urinate for some time. I had to go. The shy boy was piqued. When I came back, he was with the other girl. I no longer remember whether it was André or Ringo who took the precaution of telling me that he himself had only gone to “finish off” with her.

  I stayed in Lyon for about two weeks. My friends worked during the day, and I spent my afternoons with the student I had met in London. When his parents were out, I would lie down on his cabin bed and he would lie on top of me, and I had to be careful not to knock my head against his shelves. I was still inexperienced, but I regarded him as even more of a novice than myself from the way he furtively slid his still slightly limp cock into my vagina, and the way he so quickly slumped his face down onto my neck. He must have been sufficiently preoccupied with what a woman’s reaction might and should be to ask whether the sperm projecting onto the walls of the vagina produced a specific sensation of pleasure. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even feel his penetration that distinctly, much less to distinguish a viscous little puddle somewhere inside me. “Really, that’s strange, no special feeling?” “No, nothing at all.” He worried more than I did.