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June 18, 2009 | “I remember the moment I first became aware of aging,” says the novelist Kate Christensen, now 46, at a rooftop cafe near her house in Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I was 30. I looked down at my knees and the skin above them had become a little loose. And I thought, ‘And so it begins’!”

Probably the swiftest way to trivialize the work of a woman writer is to make a big to-do about how sexy she is in person. But Christensen, wearing no make-up and a fitted gray dress, has the easy and direct confidence of a person who feels good in her own skin. Her last novel, “The Great Man” (which won the PEN/Faulkner award), was about three women in their 70s and 80s — two widows and an embittered lesbian painter — who rediscover love, lust and ambition after the death of the “great man,” an artist who had always towered over them all.

In her latest, novel, “Trouble,” two college best friends in their mid-40s, Josie, a Manhattan psychotherapist, and Raquel, an indie rock star, meet up in Mexico City for a “Thelmita and Luisa”-style adventure. Josie has just informed her professor husband, Anthony, and her adopted daughter, Wendy, that she is moving out. Raquel is hiding out from the paparazzi (her most virulent pursuer is a Latina lesbian blogger known as Mina Boriqua) after having been vilified for dating an HBO star half her age, who also happens to have a pregnant girlfriend. The two spend five days in Mexico drinking sangrita and mescal, eating chorizo tacos and chilaquiles, hanging out with artists, and getting reacquainted with a new adult version of their younger selves. But while Josie is coming out of hibernation and reclaiming a sexuality she didn’t feel in her 20s, she doesn’t realize that Raquel may be going in a very different direction.

via Sex and the (fortysomething) single girl | Salon Books.

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• Anxious, Critically-Panned Manhattanite Wins PEN/Faulker Award [Struggling Writers] (gawker.com)

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: June 17, 2009

Gloria Vanderbilt’s new novel, “Obsession: An Erotic Tale,” which comes out next week, may be the steamiest book ever written by an octogenarian. And it’s one of very few volumes to arrive on the sex-book shelf accompanied by a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates, who calls it, “a remarkable tapestry of human passion — an interior world of highly charged erotic mysteries that teasingly suggest, but ever elude, decoding.”

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Gloria Vanderbilt, heiress and author.

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Little Gloria Was Happy Here (April 16, 2009)

Browse Inside the Book at HarperCollins.com

In other words, it’s not always clear what’s going on. “Obsession,” published by Ecco, is the story of Priscilla Bingham, the widow of a Frank Lloyd Wright-like architect who, after his death, discovers a cache of letters, wrapped in magenta grosgrain ribbon, revealing in considerable detail his secret, kinky sex life. The author of these letters is Bee, a mysterious woman who may be a figment of Priscilla’s imagination, or possibly Priscilla is a figment of Bee’s. Either way, the letters don’t leave much out.

“Obsession” is written in stylized literary prose that owes something to Pauline Réage’s “Story of O,” and is set in a world that’s partly fantastical. It’s erotica, not porn. But it nevertheless uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from. There are scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods. As the book explains, spanking with a Mason-Pearson is a “serious matter,” not the kind of thing that is rewarded with the “luscious afterglow of warm cocoa butter.” Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.

via At 85, Gloria Vanderbilt Writes ‘Obsession,’ a Novel of Sex, Masks and More – NYTimes.com.